Rallying Support: The Impact of Political Rallies on Small Dollar Donations

• In Event: Poster Session: Predicting Political Participation

Abstract

Recent empirical research has investigated the importance of campaign visits—that is, a public appearance organized by campaigns to appeal to local constituents—to campaign strategy in presidential elections, emphasizing the effect on both mobilization and persuasion of voters (Devine, 2023). This scholarship finds that campaign visits do not often influence voting behavior, but when they do influence voting behavior it is frequently via persuasion of voters rather than mobilization. While the importance of campaign visits for both voter turnout and voter persuasion has been assessed, there is scant evidence of the impact of campaign visits on fundraising. In particular, we might expect there to be limited impact of visits on voter turnout and behavior because of the long time between a campaign visit and the actual election. However, we would expect a more immediate impact on fundraising, as donors can donate at any time rather than just election day. Using the Campaign Visits Database (Devine, 2023) and a novel dataset of nearly half a billion small dollar contributions to ActBlue and WinRed, the main conduit committees for the Democratic and Republican parties respectively, we estimate the impact of local campaign visits on donor behavior nearby.

In recent elections, soliciting small-dollar donors has become an increasingly important part of a campaign’s mobilization strategies. Moreover, campaigns use the average contribution amounts and number of small dollar donors for campaign messaging, arguing that their donors are more like the American public than large dollar donors (Kim & Li, 2023). Today, nearly all small-dollar donations are made using the ActBlue and WinRed fundraising platforms (Bouton et al., 2022; Kim & Li, 2022). Because of their status as conduit committees, ActBlue and WinRed are required by law to report all donations to the FEC, not just donors who donate above $200. We collected all donations to ActBlue and WinRed from 2004 to 2022 reported to the FEC, representing a near-complete dataset of small dollar contributions. We combine these data with the Campaign Visits Database (Devine, 2023), which represents a complete dataset of campaign visits by Presidential and Vice Presidential candidates from 2008 to 2020.

We use a difference-in-differences design to compare small dollar donations before and after campaign visits. Campaigns visit both party strongholds and swing districts. We expect that campaign visits to swing states would result in more new donors (donors that have never donated to the candidate before), both pre- and post-primary. Further, we expect that visits to safe states will result in more donations from existing donors, moreso pre- than post-primary. We also expect that larger events such as rallies will have a higher impact than smaller events such as visits to local businesses.

Authors

• Megan Brown, University of Michigan

• Maggie Macdonald, University of Kentucky

• Rachel Porter, University of Notre Dame

• James Hodgdon Bisbee, Vanderbilt University