Four years ago, as of Sept. 30, 2020, I had raised a total of $3.6 million for Democrats up & down the ballot, broken out as follows;
- U.S. Senate: $2.93M (81%)
- U.S. House: $293K (8.2%)
- State Legislature: $300K (8.3%)
- POTUS: $66.4K (1.8%)
- State Execs (Gov/AG/SoS): $10.3K (0.3%)
- State Supreme Court: n/a (0%)
- Other: n/a (0%)
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TOTAL: $3,600,874
So how am I doing as of the end of September this cycle by comparison?
- U.S. Senate: $1.25M (11.2%)
- U.S. House: $907K (8.2%)
- State Legislature: $732K (6.6%)
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POTUS: $8.03 MILLION (72%)
- State Execs (Gov/AG/SoS): $77.2K (0.7%)
- State Supreme Court: $99.0K (0.9%)
- Other:$23.4K (0.2%)
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TOTAL: $11,115,768
Overall, I've raised 3.1x 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% of my total fundraising this cycle to 72%.
Having said that, there's still great news elsewhere 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 12,000% higher compared to the same point in 2020 ($8.0M vs.$66.4K).
As for the other types of races:
- U.S. House: I've raised 3.1x more so far this cycle than the same point in 2020
- State Legislative: I've raised 2.4x more so far this cycle than the same point in 2020
- State Executives: I've raised 7.5x more so far this cycle, although it's actually more like 19.3x higher when you include State Supreme Court races and Other fundraising, which I didn't do at all in 2020.
The "Other" category includes Voters of Tomorrow, reproductive rights ballot initiative advocacy organizations in 10 states and a few other oddball organizations.
The one category where I'm lagging behind the same point in 2020 is U.S. Senate Democrats, but this requires some context.
The bad news is that I've gone from raising nearly as much as 2020 to less than half as much over just the past 2 weeks. There's a very specific reason for this, however: Ruth Bader Ginsburg passed away on Sept. 18, 2020, which led to an immediate and massive surge in Senate Dem fundraising that year, not too different from the explosion in money raised by Kamala Harris in the first week or so after she replaced President Biden as the 2024 nominee.
You can easily see this in the following graph which overlays my 2024 fundraising over time (with & without POTUS included) vs. 2020 over the same time period:
However, a closer look at the U.S. Senate data shows that the dropoff from 2020 isn't quite as dramatic as it looks when you break it out between competitive and long shot races.
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 September 30, 2020, Senate donations were split 60/40 between the Competitive and Long Shot Senate races.
THIS cycle, however, 86% of the Senate funds I've raised have gone to one of the competitive races, with just 14% going to the other ten long shots combined.
As a result, while my overall Senate fundraising is indeed down a whopping 57% from 2020, for competitive races it's only down 39% (the long shot races are down 85%):
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 end of September for the 52 races on my main House page (I've also raised lesser amounts ranging from as little as $1.50 to as much as $3,400 apiece for another 180 candidates but it would take too long to fill in all of their districts & states).
In this case the green rows are the ones rated as true Tossups by Cook Political Report while the yellow ones are rated as Lean D or Lean R:
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 $1,125 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 $210,000 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!