Four years ago, at the end of June 2020, I had raised a total of $409,000 for Democrats up & down the ballot, broken out as follows;
- U.S. Senate: $270K (66%)
- U.S. House: $96K (24%)
- State Legislature: $37K (9%)
- POTUS: $4.7K (1.1%)
- State Execs (Gov/AG/SoS): $1.1K (0.3%)
- State Supreme Court: n/a (0%)
- Other: n/a (0%)
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TOTAL: $408,887
So how am I doing as of the end of June this cycle by comparison?
- U.S. Senate: $256K (34%)
- U.S. House Seats: $159K (21%)
- State Legislature: $269K (35%)
- POTUS: $16,6K (2,2%)
- State Execs (Gov/AG/SoS): $30.4K (4.0%)
- State Supreme Court: $12.1K (1.6%)
- Other:$19.7K (2.6%)
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TOTAL: $762,665
So far I've raised 87% more than at the same point four years ago...but the breakout is dramatically different.
Here's what it looks like side by side (I've scaled the 2024 chart up to reflect the overall increase):
As you can see, while 2020 was almost entirely about retaking the U.S. Senate, this time around I'm putting a much greater emphasis on STATE LEGISLATURES, which also includes State Democratic Parties as well as State House/Senate Democratic Caucuses.
In addition, I've started raising money for State Supreme Court races this cycle.
Finally, the "Other" category includes fundraising for Voters of Tomorrow Action as well as the Reproductive Rights Ballot Proposals in Florida, Arizona and Montana.
Here's what it looks like another way:
My U.S. Senate fundraising continues to lag slightly behind the same point in 2020 (down about 5%), but I'll get back to that below.
U.S. House fundraising is a different story, however: That's up 66% vs. the same point four years ago: $159K vs. $96K.
The most dramatic difference is the MASSIVE in state legislative race donations--up 7.3x as much so far vs the same point last cycle!
My fundraising is also dramatically higher this cycle for the remaining categories (President, State Executives, State Supreme Court & Other), although that's a bit misleading since I wasn't really pushing the former two categories and didn't even include the latter two.
Taking a closer look at the U.S. Senate number: While it's down a bit overall, it's important to break this out between competitive races and long shot seats.
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 has been on & off the page at various points this year.
There's another nine GOP seats which are likely pipe dreams but again, you never know: IN, MS, MO, NE Special, ND, TN, UT, WV & WY. I had NE Independent candidate Dan Osborn listed briefly for the NE full term Senate race, but he's a non-factor.
Thru June 2020, Senate donations were split nearly evenly between the two groups of candidates (55% / 45%).
THIS cycle, however, 81% of the Senate funds I've raised have gone to one of the competitive races, with just 19% going to the other nine long shots combined.
As a result, while my total Senate fundraising is down 5%, for COMPETITIVE Senate seats it's actually UP 38%!
Here's what the rolling 21-day average looks like for overall fundraising. As you can see, the infamous June 27th "debate" and the absurdly over-the-top response from media & political pundits led to a MASSIVE spike in donations over the final few days of June (admittedly part of this was also likely due to June 30th being the final day of the month and the final day of the 2nd quarter, which is a Big Deal from a quarterly campaign finance report POV:
Note: I've decided to stop tracking my monthly social media impact tracking, at least publicly; there's not much to report...the other platforms (Threads, Blue Sky, Mastodon and Spoutible) continue to significantly outperform Twitter on a per-follower click-thru basis.
