UPDATE 9/18/24: While the breakout below only runs through midnight on 9/15 (when the grand total was $9.87 million), last night I broke $10 MILLION total raised, so I've updated the headline.
Four years ago, as of Sept. 15, 2020, I had raised a total of $1.72 million for Democrats up & down the ballot, broken out as follows;
- U.S. Senate: $1.26M (73%)
- U.S. House: $263K (15%)
- State Legislature: $174K (10%)
- POTUS: $19.3K (1.1%)
- State Execs (Gov/AG/SoS): $9.2K (0.5%)
- State Supreme Court: n/a (0%)
- Other: n/a (0%)
-
TOTAL: $1,723,300
So how am I doing as of mid-September this cycle by comparison?
Well, let's just say I'm doing...better.
- U.S. Senate: $910K (9.2%)
- U.S. House: $699K (7.1%)
- State Legislature: $575K (5.8%)
-
POTUS: $7.50 MILLION (76%)
- State Execs (Gov/AG/SoS): $65.3K (0.7%)
- State Supreme Court: $58.6K (0.6%)
- Other:$65.0K (0.7%)
-
TOTAL: $9,870,507
Overall, I've raised 5.7x as much for Democrats so far this cycle as I had at the same point in 2020.
Needless to say, this has completely destroyed my prior 2024 cycle / 2020 cycle comparison graphs.
Here's what they look like side by side...scaled to reflect the massive increase in the overall size of the fundraising pie vs. four years ago:
When I launched my 2024 fundraising project, I was naively hoping to raise perhaps $4 million total, broken out roughly into thirds: 1/3 U.S. Senate races; 1/3 U.S. House races; and 1/3 State Legislative and Statewide Executive races. While I included President Biden on some pages as a courtesy, I was really hoping to focus heavily on down ballot races, especially at the state legislative level.
And until July 21st, that's pretty much where my 2024 cycle fundraising project was headed.
NOW, however...well, POTUS has skyrocketed from making up just 1.1% of my total fundraising this cycle to 76%.
Having said that, there's still great news in nearly every other category as well.
Here's what it looks like in bar graph format. For obvious reasons, I wasn't able to fit the fundraising for VP Harris on the chart; if I had tried, most of the other columns would have been virtually invisible:
My POTUS fundraising is up a batshit insane 38,850% higher compared to the same point in 2020 ($7.5M vs.$19.3K).
As for the other types of races:
- My U.S. Senate fundraising is the only category where I'm lagging behind the same point in 2020 (down about 28%), however, there's a major caveat toth is; see below.
- My U.S. House fundraising is a different story: It's 2.7x higher than what I had raised at this point last cycle.
- My State Legislative race fundraising is even more impressive: 3.3x higher than the same point in 2020.
My fundraising thru August is also dramatically higher for State Executive and State Supreme Court races, although I didn't really focus much on those in 2020 anyway (and in fact I wasn't raising money for state Supreme Court races at all last cycle).
Finally, I've raised over $65,000 for a variety of other assorted organizations, including:
- State & County Democratic Parties
- Voters of Tomorrow
- Reproductive Rights ballot initiative advocacy organizations in Arizona, Florida, Missouri & Montana
- A few other oddball organizations
Taking a closer look at the U.S. Senate number: While it's down 28% overall, it's important to break this 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. I also briefly included Tim Kaine (Virginia) before removing him, and Andy Kim was on the page for awhile earlier this year.
There's another ten GOP seats which are likely pipe dreams but again, you never know: IN, MS, MO, NE*, NE Special, ND, TN, UT, WV & WY.
Thru Mid-September 2020, Senate donations were split 58/42 between the Tier 1 and Tier 2 Senate races.
THIS cycle, however, 83% of the Senate funds I've raised have gone to one of the competitive races, with just 17% going to the other ten long shots combined.
As a result, while my total Senate fundraising is down, for COMPETITIVE Senate seats it's actually UP slightly (4%)!
Here's a final graph to help put things into perspective:
The orange line shows how much I raised for Democrats total over the course of 2020. The upward spike in late September was caused by Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg passing away on Sept. 18, 2020.
The black line shows how my overall fundraising efforts are going this year.
(I've also included a green line showing what my 2024 fundraising looks like without POTUS included...as you can see, it's still well ahead of the same point 4 years ago.)
Here's how much I've raised to date for each U.S. Senate candidate. As you can see, the Tier 1 races are well ahead of the Tier 2 ones, with the exceptions of the two which I removed some time ago (Kim & Kaine).
(Joe Manchin & Zach Shrewsbury were both listed very briefly when I thought each of them was going to be the nominee, a mistake on my part).
Here's the breakout of my U.S. House fundraising thru the 15th. I recently added an "Unlikely Heroes" page which includes 160 districts considered non-competitive by the major election pundits/analysts, but I figured I should at least give people an easy way to donate to them if they really want to:
Here's the breakout of what I've raised for State Legislative Democrats, including the State Democratic Parties & Democratic legislative caucus PACs whose sole purpose is to elect state legislative Democrats.
The 8 swing states (in green) make up just over half of the total. The grey states are the ones which held their legislative elections in 2023. Alabama and Maryland don't have legislative races until 2026, and Connecticut's state office elections are publicly financed.
I'm raising money for a total of around ~650 state legislative candidates, so that breaks out to an average of around $950 apiece so far.
Next, let's look at what links are driving the donations. This is an imprecise estimate since I sometimes forget to include the refcode tag when I post the links on social media, but it should at least provide some idea of how effective different outlets are:
I want to give a special shoutout to Bill Palmer of Palmer Report, who has been promoting the heck out of my "Endgame" fundraising links via Twitter for the past week or so to his 500K+ followers on Twitter.
As far as I can figure, he & his supporters specifically have raised upwards of $144,000 for Democratic candidates via my "Endgame" links so far.
While the chart above may make it seem as though the social media posts aren't that effective, it's important to remember that a) again, I sometimes forget to include referral codes myself when posting to social media, and b) many people who show up as donating via the links here at Blue24.org found that link via my posts on Twitter, Blue Sky, Threads etc.
It's also important to note that the link to my POTUS page went viral right after President Biden endorsed VP Harris, almost certainly due to someone with a lot of followers tweeting it out directly to several million followers. I have no idea who it was, but I'm eternally grateful!
