Four years ago, at the end of March 2020, I had raised a total of just over $227,000 for Democrats up & down the ballot, broken out as follows;
- U.S. Senate Seats: $137,222 (60.4%)
- U.S. House Seats: $66,102 (29.1%)
- State Execs (Gov/AG/SoS): $942 (0.4%)
- State Legislative Seats: $21,473 (9.5%)
- Biden/other POTUS: $1,392 (0.6%)
- Other: n/a (0.0%)
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TOTAL: $227,131
So how am I doing this cycle by comparison?
- U.S. Senate: $85,979 (24.4%)
- U.S. House: $67,062 (19.0%)
- State Execs: $16,969 (4.8%)
- State Leg: $165,964 (47.1%)
- POTUS: $4,135 (1.2%)
- Other: $12,412 (3.5%)
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TOTAL: $352,521
So far I've raised 55% more than at the same point four years ago...but the breakout is dramatically different. Here's what it looks like side by side:
As you can see, while 2020 was all about retaking the U.S. Senate, this time around I'm putting a much greater emphasis on STATE LEGISLATURES, which also includes State Democratic Parties as well as State House/Senate Democratic Caucuses.
I've also been including Voters of Tomorrow Action on most of my fundraising pages this cycle ("Other") although I'm phasing that out as each state's filing deadline and/or primary passes & more actual Democratic nominees are locked in.
Here's what it looks like another way:
The most dramatic difference is the huge increase in state legislative race donations--over 7.7x as much so far vs the same point last cycle!
Similarly, state executive race fundraising (Governor, Attorney General, Secretary of State) is way up as well (18x as much, although that's compared against almost nothing in 2020). I've raised 3x as much for President Biden's campaign as I did in 2020, although it's still a nominal amount and I've decided to drop POTUS from my fundraising efforts this cycle entirely, since he clearly doesn't need it (he raised a stunning $25 million from a single fundraiser a few days ago).
I've also raised over $12,000 for Voters of Tomorrow so far, but again, that's going to taper off as I phase VoT out from the various state legislative pages as filing deadlines & primaries pass in order to focus more on the actual candidate campaigns.
As of February, my U.S. House fundraising was lagging 2020...but I caught up this month and even surpassed it slightly, raising over $67,000 to help Dems flip the House blue again.
Finally, I've also made major headway with raising money for U.S. Senate races. Last month my total Senate fundraising was running less than half as much as the same point in 2020...but it's up to 62% as much as of the end of the first quarter of 2024.
In addition, again, it's important to break the Senate numbers out between competitive races and long shot seats:
In 2020, there were a dozen Senate races which were generally considered up for grabs: AZ, CO, GA (x2), IA, ME, MI, MN, MO, NH, NM & NC. There were another 16 Republican-held seats which were basically unflippable by Dems, but which I listed on the fundraising page in order to encourage party building and other reasons.
This year there's 10 (11) Senate seats I consider competitive (or at least potentially competitive): AZ, FL, MD, MI, MT, NV, NJ, ,OH, PA, TX & WI. Florida and Texas are reaches but still in the "competitive" category, while New Jersey is a special case; I'm only planning on keeping it on the page until after the June primary unless there's an extraordinary development.
There's another ten GOP seats which are likely pipe dreams but again, you never know.
Thru March 2020, Senate donations were split nearly evenly between the two (52% / 48%). As of today this cycle, however, over 80% of the Senate funds I've raised have gone to one of the competitive races, with just 20% going to the other ten long shots combined. As a result, while my total Senate fundraising is down 38%, for competitive seats it's only down 3%:
Here's what the fundraising project has looked like over time for both cycles. The orange line is how much I actually raised (total) during the 2020 cycle. The dotted blue line is how much I expected to raise this cycle--I was erring on the side of caution, assuming that I'd probably only raise perhaps 2/3 as much this time around given the unique circumstances surrounding the 2020 election.
Instead, so far at least, I've been proven wildly wrong (much to my pleasant surprise!)...so far I've raised 55% more than the same point four years ago!
Obviously this may not last, but only time will tell. In the meantime, I'm currently on track to reach perhaps $425,000 by the end of April.
Finally, let's look at my ongoing Social Media Platform Engagement experiment.
Back in November 2023, I started including referral codes with the ActBlue fundraising links I posted across various social media platforms. this allowed me to start tracking how many people were clicking the links I posted via Twitter, Threads, Mastodon and so on.
I also started tracking how many followers I had on each platform, since those increase or decrease over time, so I could start tracking clickthrus per follower, which is necessary for an apples to apples comparison; obviously getting more visitors through Twitter doesn't mean much if I have ~50 times as many followers on that platform than on another one.
The table below show how each platform compared in February.
Through January, every one of the other five platforms dramatically outperformed Twitter on a per follower basis, with most of them seeing 2 - 6x as many clickthrus per follower than Twitter did.
In February, there was an interesting change on two of them: Post, which has always been the 2nd-worst performing platform, came in 18% behind Twitter...and Mastodon, which had previously been among the best-performing platforms, ran nearly even with Twitter. And I think I know why.
Each of the other platforms automatically recognizes & generates the "preview card" image (the thumbnail graphic which links to the ActBlue page), but these don't seem to work properly on Mastodon for whatever reason; it just generates a plain text link. Starting February 1st I began manually uploading/attaching the preview image, figuring it would help boost clicks if people could see the candidates I was asking them to donate to. However, unlike preview cards, these are just plain images which don't actually link to anything...and I think attaching them may have been a mistake, because Mastodon's clickthru rate dropped dramatically, from ovder 100/follower in January to just 25/follower in February.
Sure enough, after going back to not manually uploading preview images to Mastodon, it's joined the other platforms in once again massively outperforming Twitter: All five of the others saw anywhere from 1.9x - 4.4x as many clickthrus per follower than Twitter did.
I also continued to gain a small number of followers on all six platforms in March...126 on Twitter and another 105 across the other five combined (which has nothing to do with the fundraising project, but if I'm gonna track social media clickthru rates I might as well track this as well).
