Four years ago, at the end of July 2020, I had raised a total of $692,000 for Democrats up & down the ballot, broken out as follows;
- U.S. Senate: $472K (68%)
- U.S. House: $136K (20%)
- State Legislature: $77K (11%)
- POTUS: $4.9K (0.7%)
- State Execs (Gov/AG/SoS): $2.2K (0.3%)
- State Supreme Court: n/a (0%)
- Other: n/a (0%)
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TOTAL: $691,913
So how am I doing as of the end of July this cycle by comparison?
Well, let's just say I'm doing...better.
- U.S. Senate: $407K (7.0%)
- U.S. House: $270K (4.6%)
- State Legislature: $337K (5.8%)
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POTUS: $4.737 MILLION (81.3%)
- State Execs (Gov/AG/SoS): $38.4K (0.7%)
- State Supreme Court: $18.0K (0.3%)
- Other:$21.3K (0.4%)
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TOTAL: $5,828.319
That isn't a typo. I raised $4.72 million for the Democratic Presidential Nominee in July, virtually all of it happening immediately after President Biden announced he was dropping out of the campaign and endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris.
Overall, I've raised over 8.4x as much for Democrats so far this cycle as I had at the same point in 2020.
Needless to say, this has completely destroyed my prior 2024 cycle / 2020 cycle comparison graphs.
Here's what they look like side by side...scaled to reflect the massive increase in the overall size of the fundraising pie vs. four years ago:
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 and Statewide Executive races. While I included President Biden on some pages as a courtesy, I was really hoping to focus heavily on downballot races, especially at the state legislative level.
And until July 21st, that's pretty much where my 2024 cycle fundraising project was headed.
NOW, however...well, POTUS has skyrocketed from making up 2.2% of my total fundraising this cycle to over 81%, literally within the past ten days!
Having said that, there's still great news in nearly every other category as well, if not nearly as dramatic.
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:
My POTUS fundraising is up a batshit insane 95,800% compared to the same point in 2020 (less than $5,000).
As for the other types of races:
- My U.S. Senate fundraising continues to lag behind the same point in 2020 (down about 14%), however, there's a big caveat whcih I'll get to below.
- My U.S. House fundraising is a different story: It's nearly double what I had raised at this point last cycle ($270K vs. $136K).
- My State Legislative race fundraising is up massively vs. 2020: $337.4K vs. $76.6K, or 4.4x higher.
My fundraising thru July is also dramatically higher for State Executive and State Supreme Court races, although I didn't really focus much on those in 2020 anyway (and in fact I wasn't raising money for state Supreme Court races at all last cycle).
Finally, I've raised over $21,000 for other assorted organizations...Voters of Tomorrow, the coalitions fighting to pass reproductive rights ballot initiatives in Arizona, Florida and Montana, and a few other odds & ends.
Taking a closer look at the U.S. Senate number: While it's down 14% 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 ten GOP seats which are likely pipe dreams but again, you never know: IN, MS, MO, NE*, NE Special, ND, TN, UT, WV & WY.
*(Note: I recently re-added independent NE candidate Dan Osborn after removing him from the page earlier this summer.)
Thru July 2020, Senate donations were split around 60/40 between the Tier 1 and Tier 2 Senate races.
THIS cycle, however, 80% of the Senate funds I've raised have gone to one of the competitive races, with just 20% going to the other ten long shots combined.
As a result, while my total Senate fundraising is down 14%, for COMPETITIVE Senate seats it's actually UP 17%!
Here's a final graph to help put things into perspective: the orange line shows how much I raised for Democrats total over the course of 2020. The upward spike in late September was caused by Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg passing away on Sept. 18, 2020.
The black line shows how my overall fundraising efforts are going this year.
(I've also included a green line showing what my 2024 fundraising looks like without POTUS included...as you can see, it's still well ahead of the same point 4 years ago.)
