Small-dollar donations are particularly coveted because they can telegraph grassroots support. Grassroots support, in turn, can indicate that a candidate is in touch with everyday people.
This is something politicians love to tout. After announcing her campaign in 2019, Elizabeth Warren boasted that her average donation was $28. Last year, the New York Times reported that 668,000 donors gave less than $200 to Trump. And within five hours of Biden endorsing Harris to replace him as the Democratic nominee on Sunday, ActBlue — a left-leaning fundraising website — excitedly confirmed it had raised over $27.5 million from small-dollar donors.
“Every little bit helps, from the candidates’ perspective, even at the presidential level,” says Conor Dowling, a political science professor at the University at Buffalo. “Those individual contributions signal that they have support from people — and it's not just a few millionaires and billionaires.”
Size aside, another major reason campaigns solicit donations is to collect data. Heerwig says that once a voter makes their first contribution, they become part of the donor list, which can be shared with other candidates and the party, giving them direct access to a highly politically engaged audience.
Remember the fervor over Bernie Sanders’ 2016 email database? There’s a reason Politico called it his “secret weapon.”
Once someone donates, “that person can be targeted with get-out-the-vote communications or [become] a volunteer, somebody who is engaging with the campaign in a different way,” says Shanna Ports, senior legal counsel in campaign finance at the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center. “They can become an active participant in the campaign.”
They can also, crucially, be asked for further donations. And all those small donations add up to big numbers that make headlines.
“[Campaigns] know that number is going to be splashed around in the press, and it becomes a metric of their likelihood of success,” Ports says. “If they can get a lot of $2 donations, that might put them over the edge to that number they're targeting.”
On a practical level, Dowling says emails and texts like the ones I’m getting are relatively quick and inexpensive for campaigns to send. The lift is low, and the payoff is potentially great. Some back-of-the-envelope math: If a message goes out to 500,000 people, and a fourth of them feel moved to donate $2, that’s $250,000 more in the bank.
No candidate is going to turn their nose up to a quarter of a million bucks.
“They can find a use for money if they have it,” Dowling says.
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