Four years ago, as of Election Day 2020, I had raised a grand total of $5.72 million for Democrats up & down the ballot, plus an additional $280,000 after Election Day for the 2 Georgia Senate runoff races, for a total of $5.90 million.
The $5.9M total was broken out as follows:
- U.S. Senate: $4.80M (81.3%)
- U.S. House: $422K (7.2%)
- State Legislature: $561K (9.5%)
- POTUS: $105K (1.8%)
- State Execs (Gov/AG/SoS): $16.2K (0.3%)
- State Supreme Court: n/a (0%)
- Other: n/a (0%)
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TOTAL: $5,900,732
By comparison, as of Election Day 2024, I had raised a grand total of $13.53 million, broken out like so:
- U.S. Senate: $1.71M (12.6%)
- U.S. House: $1.26M (9.3%)
- State Legislature: $874K (6.5%)
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POTUS: $9.44 MILLION (69.7%)
- State Execs (Gov/AG/SoS): $102.2K (0.8%)
- State Supreme Court: $115.4K (0.9%)
- Other:$38.7K (0.3%)
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TOTAL: $13,534,102
Overall, I've raised 2.3x as much for Democrats so far this cycle as I did over the full 2020 cycle.
Here's what they look like side by side:
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 & Statewide Executive races. I wasn't even planning on raising money for the Presidential race beyond listing President Biden on a few pages as a courtecy; 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.
AFTER that, of course, POTUS skyrocketed from making up just 1% of my total fundraising during the 2024 cycle to nearly 70%.
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:
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POTUS: I ended up rasing a batshit insane 90x as much as I did in 2020 ($9.44M vs.$105K).
- U.S. House: I raised 3x as much as I did in 2020 ($1.26M vs. $422K)
- State Legislative: I raised nearly 1.6x as much as I did in 2020 ($874K vs. $561K)
- State Executives: I raised 6.3x as much as I did in 2020, although it's actually more like 15.8x 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 running considerably behind the same point in 2020 is U.S. Senate Democrats, but this requires some context.
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.
As a result, I was never expecting to raise as much for U.S. Senate races this year as I did in 2020, and sure enough, I only raised about 35% as much ($1.71M vs. $4.80M). 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 drop-off 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 were 10 Senate seats I considered 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 were pretty much pipe dreams: IN, MS, MO, NE, NE Special, ND, TN, UT, WV & WY.
In 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 was indeed down a whopping 65% from 2020, for competitive races it was only down 50% (the long shot races were down 87%):
Here's the grand totals I raised for each U.S. Senate candidate.
(Note: The greyed-out candidates are legacy donations from prior cycle candidates or 2024 candidates who dropped out/lost primaries.)
Here's the breakout of my U.S. House fundraising for every seat where I raised at least $100 or more. I've color coded them by those for whom I've raised more than $40K, $30K - $40K, $20K - $30K, $10K - $20K, $1K - $10K and $100 - $1,000. I'm not including another ~100 or so House candidates for whom I raised less than $100 apiece:
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 (LA, MS, NJ, VA) or which don't have any until 2026 (AL, MD). Connecticut (tan) state races are completely publicly financed.
Finally we get to social media donor sources. Using RefCode tags I'm able to mostly tell which donations are coming from which social media platforms or other sources. This isn't 100% accurate since I occasionally forget to include the tags, but it should be pretty close.
The main takeaway here is that of the microblogging social media platforms I cross-posted donation links to daily throughout the past year, posting them via Blue Sky had by far the highest results on a per-follower basis:
My posts to Blue Sky generated an average of over $30 in donations per follower of mine. Threads was in second with over $15/follower. Mastodon had $11.50, and both Spoutible & Twitter came in last with less than $4 per follower apiece.
