Welcome to Pay Dirt—exclusive reporting and research from The Daily Beast’s Lachlan Markay on corruption, campaign finance, and influence-peddling in the nation’s capital. For Beast Inside members only.
More than 80 percent of small-dollar contributions raised this year by Republican congressmen facing competitive re-election fights went to just three candidates: Reps. Devin Nunes, Steve King, and Duncan Hunter.
We examined first-quarter fundraising numbers for every incumbent on the Cook Political Report’s list of competitive 2020 House races—52 Democrats and 35 Republicans in all. Nunes, King, and Hunter are the only congressmen of either party who got more than half of all their individual contributions in Q1 in the form of unitemized donations, or donations of less than $200.
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On the one hand, their success seems like a promising sign for the GOP as the National Republican Congressional Committee stresses the need to beef up its candidates’ small-dollar fundraising capabilities—and hypes its candidates’ supposed success in doing so.
“That’s something that definitely has to happen on the Republican side,” NRCC Chairman Tom Emmer said late last year of the sizable small-dollar fundraising taking place on the left.
“Our candidates are certainly making appeals to the small-dollar donors and have been successful at it,” committee spokesman Bob Salera told NPR last month. “We’re seeing impressive across-the-board numbers.”
We decided to put those claims to the test. On its face, the data appear to support Salera’s boast. On average, Republican incumbents in competitive races got about 17 percent of their total individual contributions through unitemized donations in the first quarter. That’s compared to 13 percent for Democrats.
In terms of sheer dollars, Republicans on the list are also keeping pace, if not quite outdoing their competitors. They raised an average of about $34,000 in unitemized contributions in the first quarter, compared to about $37,000 for Democrats.
But that’s where the promising signs for Republicans end.
Remove Nunes, King, and Hunter from the equation, and the average GOP small-dollar haul plummets to $14,000. Few other candidates have had much luck bringing in large sums of unitemized contributions. And it’s not clear that other Republicans can or should mimic the fundraising tactics of those three.
Nunes is by far the most prolific small-dollar fundraiser of the candidates we examined. He’s become a household name among the GOP grassroots for his strident support of President Trump as the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee. And the bulk of his huge first-quarter small-dollar haul came through fundraising appeals invoking his longshot lawsuit against Twitter and a number of his parodic detractors on the platform.
King, for his part, has a committed grassroots following among voters who don’t mind that he has played footsie with white supremacy. And Hunter is currently under federal indictment over allegations that he misused campaign funds, but has managed to turn that into a fundraising pitch that portrays him as a victim of a liberal conspiracy.
The data suggest that to the extent Republicans are posting impressive small-dollar fundraising numbers, it’s largely a product of the idiosyncratic grassroots appeal of a number of high-profile candidates, not, as with the Democrats, any centralized small-dollar fundraising apparatus deployed in support of the party’s vulnerable members.
We put together a spreadsheet laying out the contribution data we gathered. You can view that spreadsheet here.
Get the data:
