Almost immediately after a draft Supreme Court opinion overturning abortion rights leaked last week, Democrats turned to a familiar method for managing their outrage: opening their wallets.
The Democratic online fundraising platform ActBlue handled $12 million of contributions to pro-abortion rights groups and candidates in the 24 hours after the Politico story was released.
Meanwhile, the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, which supports state house candidates, saw a 1,200 percent increase in traffic the night the story was published, said DLCC spokesperson Christina Polizzi. They raised over $650,000 in 48 hours, their best fundraising days of the year.
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After the initial shock of the story, Democratic candidates and groups moved quickly and aggressively to bombard email inboxes and saturate social media sites with pleas for campaign cash: at least two dozen posted hundreds of ads on Facebook alone in the days after the opinion leaked.
Though most declined to specify the dollar amounts of those historic hauls, several key Democratic organizations said that their fundraising in the last week has broken records.
David Turner, a spokesperson for the Democratic Governors Association, said that the group has raised over $1 million online, from 50,000 individual donors, since the report was published, which he said is a “big number” for the group.” They have raised over $100,000 each day since May 2.
Beyond that, said Turner, the last week has seen the strongest growth of the DGA’s email and text list in the group’s history.
“Within minutes of the draft decision becoming public, our grassroots donors rushed record-setting donations because they know there has to be a Democratic majority in Congress to protect women’s freedoms,” said Chris Taylor, spokesperson for Democrats’ House campaign arm.
An aide for Democrats’ Senate campaign arm said the organization’s “online fundraising content sent in the wake of this report broke cycle-long fundraising records within mere hours of being sent.” And last week, the Democratic National Committee saw one of its best days for small-dollar donations since January 2021.
Veteran digital fundraisers are singing the same tune. Greg Berlin, founder of Mothership Strategies—which raises money for a number of notable liberal entities—said that “collectively for our clients, last week was the biggest fundraising moment in over a year.”
“Folks are fired up, and they're protesting SCOTUS in a bunch of ways, including with their pocketbooks,” Berlin said. “We fully expect donors to engage in this fight through the midterms and beyond.”
It may not be surprising that the impending collapse of abortion rights—an outcome that has been anxiously anticipated for decades—would spur Democrats to give generously to candidates and groups who are promising to fight back.
But some Democratic strategists worry that supporters’ resources may not be so limitless as in the past, and that campaigns may not be able to keep up the fundraising momentum ahead of what is expected to be a brutally difficult 2022 midterm election.
Small-dollar donors spent the 2018 and 2020 elections funding unprecedented war chests for Democratic candidates. Those efforts largely paid off, with the party controlling the White House and majorities, albeit thin ones, in both chambers of Congress.
But many progressives are frustrated and angry that this power hasn’t delivered more policy wins, on a number of fronts—including codifying abortion access through legislation.
While there has been a noticeable increase in donor activity since the draft opinion leaked, the response seems to be smaller than expected, given the massive stakes of the news, according to a strategist who fundraises for progressive candidates and causes. The strategist spoke on condition of anonymity to candidly describe internal information.
“It’s been a year since things have started slumping,” said the strategist, who said the “air has been going out” of fundraising efforts as Democrats have struggled to counter Republicans and enact their agenda.
“It’s harder to tell activists with a straight face that electing Democrats is an effective response to bad news,” the strategist said.
There may be evidence of that fatigue in comparing fundraising totals from the aftermath of the Roe leak to the days following the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in September 2020. ActBlue processed $12 million in donations not within 24 hours but two hours after news of Ginsburg’s death became public, and it raised a total of $45 million within 14 hours.
Though Ginsburg’s death landed in the homestretch of a hotly contested presidential election campaign, it also galvanized donors partly out of fear that abortion rights were imminently at risk. Yet, the dollars came slower when news broke that their fears were likely to be realized in the coming months.
The same, perhaps, may be the case with high-dollar Democratic funders. A source familiar with the plans of major liberal donors said, for now, there’s a lot of talk about big-ticket contributions in response to the news but, so far, it’s just talk.
“They may not quite pull the trigger yet,” with donors who are waiting to hear more of a plan of action from Democrats on how they’ll fight for abortion access and how winning 2022 will allow that plan to come to fruition, the source said.
Top Democrats, notably President Joe Biden, have been clear that electing more Democrats is the clearest solution to protecting abortion rights.
“If the Court does overturn Roe, it will fall on our nation’s elected officials at all levels of government to protect a woman’s right to choose. And it will fall on voters to elect pro-choice officials this November,” Biden said in his initial response to the Politico story on May 2.
“At the federal level, we will need more pro-choice Senators and a pro-choice majority in the House to adopt legislation that codifies Roe, which I will work to pass and sign into law,” Biden said.
Though some Democrats might be frustrated that hasn’t happened already—frustration that was likely not quelled by a doomed Senate vote on Wednesday for legislation to expand abortion rights—strategists believe there is a clear case to be made to voters and donors.
In the absence of tangible results, Democrats are attempting to turn the conversation to the hardline actions Republicans would take on abortion if they control Congress.
Republican leaders and campaign organizations have largely been reluctant to amplify their anti-abortion views in the last week, Democrats believe they have more than enough material to work with in persuading voters that the GOP would embrace extreme measures.
One Democratic aide said that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s remark that a national abortion ban would be “possible” under a GOP majority was “a gift for us.”
The party’s nominee for Senate in Ohio, Rep. Tim Ryan, ran Facebook ads saying that his “extremist opponent”—J.D. Vance—“supports the end of Roe.” Vance has gone so far as to state he does not believe there should be abortion access even in cases of rape or incest.
“Now that the Supreme Court will likely vote to overturn Roe v. Wade, the stakes in our battleground race have never been higher. … Senate control runs right through Ohio,” the ad read.
A Roe rollback “gives us the opportunity to show the stakes of holding the House in a way we’ve struggled to do so far this cycle,” said one swing-district campaign aide.
“If we lose the House, Marjorie Taylor Greene will introduce a total ban on abortion in America in a Congress her party controls,” the aide said. “Painting that picture for our audiences has let us go on the offensive for why we need to protect the majority and re-engage with folks who frankly were disappointed in what we’ve accomplished so far.”
Regardless of how Democratic voters and donors respond to that pitch, the biggest fundraising shift brought about by the Roe news could be an unprecedented level of focus, and dollars, to often overlooked state-level races.
In a number of states, this fall’s governor and state legislative elections could decide the fate of abortion access in a far more direct way than congressional elections. Democrats are banking on state governments to enshrine abortion protections in a post-Roe landscape—as California and New York have done in the last week—and to roll back or weaken abortion bans in states where they are on the books.
In the last decade, Democrats have frequently neglected state-level races, allowing the GOP to flip numerous governorships and state legislatures—which have, in turn, passed restrictive abortion laws.
Polizzi, of the DLCC, said the news was a “clear wake-up call to anyone concerned about abortion rights that the avenue to protect reproductive health is by investing in your state legislature.”
“While the numbers in the U.S. Senate are what they are, the federal government is not going to be able to pass a law protecting access to Roe,” she continued. “That’s going to happen in your Democratic statehouses.”
