The Impact of Small Dollar Donations and Donors in Congressional Campaigns

• In Event: Impact of Money in Politics on Political Elites and Institutions

Abstract

Popular accounts of small-dollar donors and donations in U.S. elections tend to center on three claims: (1) that small-dollar donors are more representative of the American public than are large-dollar donors, (2) that small-dollar donors help to elevate the candidacies of politically underrepresented groups such as women and racial minorities, and (3) that small-dollar donors today have an outsized impact on election outcomes. These claims, however, have gone untested in political science scholarship due to a lack of data on small donors and donations. We leverage reporting requirements on the conduit fundraising committees WinRed and ActBlue to compile a novel data set of 97,315,472 small and large donations from 11,078,066 unique donors to U.S. House and Senate campaigns in 2020 and 2022. We employ these data to assess those common claims introduced above about the characteristics and political impacts of small-dollar donors. To do this, we revisit three pivotal studies about large-dollar fundraising in U.S. elections and extend these analyses to include small-dollar donors. We employ Gimpel, Lee, and Pearson-Merkowitz's (2008, The American Journal of Political Science) empirical approach to evaluate the representativeness of small-dollar donors. We employ Grumbach and Sahn's (2020, The American Political Science Review) and Grumbach, Sahn, and Staszak's (2022, Political Behavior) empirical approaches to measure co-ethnic and co-gender small donor mobilization. Finally, we employ Biersack, Herrnson, and Wilcox's (1993, Legislative Studies Quarterly) empirical approach to assess the electoral value of early small-dollar donations.

Authors

• Megan Brown, University of Michigan

• Maggie Macdonald, University of Kentucky

• Rachel Porter, University of Notre Dame