Progressive political fundraising in America is facing a crisis, according to a leading Democratic grassroots donor organization, which warned this month that donations to progressive groups are “way down in 2023 across the board”.
According to the Movement Voter Project, progressives have “a five-alarm fire going into 2024”. The organization’s director, Bill Wimsatt, said he was “pressing the panic button” because donor inaction is creating a movement-wide crisis.
Wimsatt said there had been a peak for progressive causes around the time of Black Lives Matter in 2020 and amid campaigning to get Donald Trump out of office. “The sense of urgency and existential necessity has dissipated in people’s minds,” he said, “though the situation going into 2024 isn’t any less existential.”
A report published by Middle Seat Consulting in July found that while the overall trend in small-donation giving is up since 2015, it is “significantly lower” in the first six months of 2023 than in the same quarters in recent years – and slowing. Cycle over cycle, fundraising is down 48%, it said.
It noted that 2015–2022 had been an extraordinary time of political upheaval and uncertainty and Donald Trump motivated donors on the Democratic side. But with Trump out of office, grassroots donors on the left feel a sense of stability and there is reduced motivation to give.
In 2020 progressive Democrats “busted our ass to win by 43,000 votes across three states”, Wimsatt says, referring to 2020 Democrat margins in Wisconsin (20,608), Arizona (10,357) and Georgia (11,799). “But if we don’t bust our ass again we’ll lose by 43,000.”
The report also identified threats to digital fundraising from an increase in spam email across the fundraising industry, Facebook’s decision to deprioritize political content and other social media innovations making it harder to target potential donors. Phone companies, too, have improved filters to limit political texting.
Economically, it added, the inflation crisis “likely had a big impact on the fundraising recession”, noting that “political giving is a luxury expense for most”.
Wimsatt reasons that political fundraising is also cyclical. In the years where it had been “exhausted” – including 2010, 2014, 2016 – there had been a resulting rightwing surge. An addition $100m-$300m deployed to grassroots organizations for the rest of 2023, he wrote in the memo, would put progressive organization in a “place of strength” going into the election year.
Maurice Mitchell, national director of the Working Families party, says that while there are natural ebbs and flows in progressive fundraising, an alert about a paucity of donor interest in such a critical election cycle was appropriate.
“The slowdown in small-dollar donations is real,” he said. “We’re coming off a high-water mark in 2020, when a lot of forces got into the action around Donald Trump and where he was taking the country. At the same time, the response to the George Floyd murder sparked the largest social movement in our country’s history.
“With Biden as president, a lot of people have shifted their interests. We have to challenge that by communicating , as the rightwing have done from activist to donor, that this is a long-term political project and a reason to make year-round investments.”
Raising fears of a second Trump term does not so far appear to be enough. “People heard about a threat to democracy in 2020 and version of it in 2022, so there is a level of fatigue,” Mitchell said.
Breathless emails flooding inboxes may be good at squeezing small-dollar donors but not good at educating the base, getting the base into the fight or winning its trust, Mitchells says, “but progressives need to articulate the ‘why’ outside of ensuring a second Biden term”, he added.
Ringing the Trump alarm may not be enough. “We think that’s one-third, and people should understand what the stakes are in putting the government in Maga control. Another third, he says, “is telling the story of what was won during this administration – the Inflation Reduction Act, infrastructure bill and American Rescue Plan”.
The last, and possibly most important, “is the positive piece of what’s left on the agenda to do. We can’t expect that a fear-based narrative [will work] to build the united front we need. So there’s work to be done inspiring the base,” Mitchell says.
If progressive organizations are successful at that, “I think we’ll see a surge of interest and a surge of resources, but it’s up to us to make that case.”
Wimsatt, too, says effective messaging is key.
“I try to tell a positive story,” he said. “We’re 13 years past the Tea Party, seven years since Trump’s first election, and it’ll take another five to 10 years to defeat them. 2024 is the battle royal and then we have a marathon after that. If we can hold on through that, we can have a progressive decade and nice things.”
