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: $158,718 (59%)
- U.S. House Seats: $82,205 (31%)
- State Execs (Gov/AG/SoS): $942 (< 1%)
- State Legislative Seats: $25,323 (9%)
- Biden/other POTUS: $1,417 (< 1%)
- Other: n/a (0.0%)
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TOTAL: $268,605
So how am I doing this cycle by comparison?
- U.S. Senate: $147,699 (32%)
- U.S. House: $83,378 (18%)
- State Execs: $18,395 (4%)
- State Leg: $188,639 (41%)
- POTUS: $4,230 (< 1%)
- Other: $13,301 (3%)
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TOTAL: $455,642
So far I've raised 70% 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 7.4x 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 (19x 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 last month).
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. The "Other" category also includes a few other stray funds like the reproductive rights initiatives in Arizona & Florida as well as my just-added State Supreme Court page, which I'm not giving its own category unless the numbers become significant.
Fundraising for competitive U.S. House races has slightly surpassed 2020 at the same point.
Finally, fundraising for U.S. Senate races has nearly caught up with 2020; it's now only 7% behind the same point four years ago.
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, MT, 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 Senate seats I consider competitive (or at least potentially competitive): AZ, FL, MD, MI, MT, NV, OH, PA, TX & WI. Florida and Texas are reaches but still in the "competitive" category. Note that now that Andy Kim is pretty much guaranteed to be the nominee, I've dropped New Jersey from the page, though the money I've already raised for him is still included here.
There's another ten GOP seats which are likely pipe dreams but again, you never know.
Thru April 2020, Senate donations were split nearly evenly between the two (53% / 47%).
THIS cycle, however, 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 7%, for COMPETITIVE Senate seats it's actually UP 40%!
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 black line is how much I've actually raised to date for the 2024 cycle.
So far I've raised a stunning 70% 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 $550,000 by the end of May.
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 April.
For most months, each 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 April this changed significantly in most cases: Threads and Spoutible were only 1.4 - 1.6x higher than Twitter, while Mastodon and Post both ran about even with it. The big exception was Blue Sky, which still received more than 4x the engagement per follower than Twitter did. Not sure what to make of that.
Post is about to become moot anyway, however, as its founder has announced that the platform is likely shutting down this month.
I also continued to gain a small number of followers on the other 5 platforms in April...exactly 100 across all five of them. I lost 107 followers on Twitter, however. This has nothing to do with the fundraising project, but if I'm gonna track social media click-thru rates I might as well track this as well.
