Abstract
Who donates to presidential campaigns? Why do small donors contribute? Do they differ in important way from large donors? Answers to these questions are surprisingly difficult to find in American politics and public administration scholarship despite the fact that presidential candidates spend an exorbitant amount of time fundraising. Although most research on campaign contributions centers on organizations like Political Action Committees (PACs), individual donors account for the bulk of donations to presidential candidates. In addition, small donors (those who give less than $200) are growing in importance for presidential candidates not only because of the need to fund expensive campaigns but also because of the normative appeal of fundraising from “regular” Americans instead of wealthy PACs. As small donors grow in importance, scholars are at a loss for understanding their contribution behavior because small donations are not reported to the Federal Election Commission (FEC) and therefore are not publicly disclosed. In the book Who Donates in Campaigns? The Importance of Message, Messenger, Medium, and Structure, David B. Magleby, Jay Goodliffe, and Joseph A. Olsen offer a unique perspective on presidential fundraising by bringing to light a stratified random sample of donors at all contribution levels. This includes data on small donors originally compiled by the campaigns of Barack Obama, John McCain, and Mitt Romney. This book combines comprehensiveness and access to unique data, and the result is the most granular profile of individual donors available today.
The authors go to great lengths to bridge the gaps in previous studies that attempt to characterize the universe of American campaign donors. Many groundbreaking studies of donation behavior use self-reported survey questions on donation behavior embedded in larger surveys. These survey questions have great appeal but are susceptible to social desirability bias where individuals might feel the need to overstate actual donation behavior. This concern is especially worrisome with donors, because their characteristics (high interest, partisan, ideological, etc.) are correlated with overreporting political activities. In other words, a strong partisan might want to signal their party attachment as strongly as possible on a survey and falsely report giving a donation. Another line of research involves sampling from FEC-reported data on actual donation behavior, thereby eliminating the concern of overreporting. However, Magleby, Goodliffe, and Olsen note that even FEC-reported campaign contributions do not paint a complete picture because small donors are not reported to the FEC. Therefore, getting a comprehensive account of political donations in America is not even possible using FEC data alone. To get leverage on questions about small donors, the authors compiled their data from actual presidential campaigns. The data collection and subsequent analysis of these data is a substantial contribution. These data are bolstered by interviews with 115 campaign professionals from Obama, McCain, and Romney’s teams, which provide context to the strategies that generated the donations. In the end, the authors find compelling trends in the messages used by candidates, the importance in the characteristics of the messenger, the medium for raising money, and the changing regulatory structures that make individual donors more important now to presidential campaigns than ever before.
Structural changes in campaign finance laws affected the incentives for campaigns to target more individual donors. The Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA) raised individual limits and allowed for federal matching for donations up to $250. These regulatory changes caused campaigns to focus on high-value, individual donors as well as small donors (at the expense of PAC money). Higher limits meant more from high-value donors, and contribution matching meant that a $250 donation can immediately be doubled. Targeting small donations also became a practical necessity for Barack Obama—roughly 40% of his monthly donations in 2008 came from small donors. Given the rising important of individual donors, who are they and what persuades them to donate?
The authors start by showing how the profile of donors has changed over time and how these changes might influence a candidate’s message. In this context, a “message” can be broadly interpreted as the reasons given by candidates to persuade voters and donors. For example, messages can include appeals about issue positions, character traits like honesty, or negative aspects of the opposing candidate. One of the most interesting developments from the early 1970s to present day is how individual donors have become wealthier, older, better educated, and more partisan (the authors show that donor profiles were not this narrow 50 years ago). With these changing demographics of donors, the messages that appeal to donors have changed as well. Because these demographic characteristics (wealthy, educated, and partisan) correlate with having a more coherent belief system, it is not surprising that messages about issues and partisanship are important parts of the message. Interestingly, small donors are just as polarized as large donors even though they tend to be younger (especially Obama donors) with lower incomes (by donor standards). These appeals are also given context with quotes from campaign professionals about the importance of specific messages for small and large donors.
Candidates themselves also play a pivotal role as messenger in fundraising for presidential campaigns. Unlike other donor studies that focus on ideology or material motivation, the authors show that personal traits of the candidates also resonate with donors. This factor is more about positive or negative characteristics of candidates that are used to appeal to donors than the content of a message. These personal traits are candidate specific, but the concept also taps into valence positions like honest and competency that all candidates aspire to have. The 2008 election appealed to donors who had positive feelings toward their respective candidates. The 2012 election, however, focused more on the negative aspects of the candidates. The Obama campaign was able to successfully raise money by attacking Romney and vice versa. Given the rise in “negative partisanship” in 2016—supporting a given candidate because the voter dislikes the opponent—this section of the book seems somewhat prescient.
Because the authors were able to get direct access to donor lists from campaigns, they were able to break down which mediums are most important for generating donations. The authors find interesting differences by party. Obama was far and away better at fundraising over the Internet compared with McCain or Romney. This was particularly true for Obama’s reelection bid in 2012. During the open-seat election in 2008, however, a large share of donations for both Obama and McCain were unsolicited. These data suggest unsolicited donations are an important source of funds when the candidate is the party nominee for the first time. This pattern changed for Obama in 2012. When Obama was a well-known incumbent in 2012, almost half of his donations came online, demonstrating a digital donation gap between the parties. These data suggest why the Republican party is trying to expand their donor base online with sites like WinRed to compete against ActBlue, a successful Democratic portal for donating money to a variety of candidates at once. WinRed also offers an opportunity for Republicans to reach small donors, which this book shows were mostly giving to Obama.
This study provides novel and comprehensive descriptive analysis about the role of donors in the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections. However, aspects of donation behavior can still be explored by future scholars. For example, the authors do not address how constrained presidential candidates are (or are not) by donors and their preferences. Without causal identification, it is difficult to parse out the influence of donors on candidates (aside from providing money needed to fund large-scale campaigns). Donors seemed to support the most salient aspects of their candidates’ campaigns, but it is difficult to evaluate whether donors are leading candidates to certain issue positions and messages, or are donors following candidates on their issues and messages? If Barack Obama or Mitt Romney supported a position that is more extreme than their party standard, will donors still make contributions? Can John McCain reach across the aisle and support an issue like immigration reform that is at odds with his party without being penalized by donors? Perhaps donors are simply well informed about the candidates and therefore appear more supportive of their issues and messages than voters. Observational data alone cannot shed light on who is doing the influencing: Is the candidate leading donors or are donors leading candidates? The answers to these questions have implications for the normative role that donors play in American democracy. That being said, Who Donates in Campaigns? makes a major contribution to the campaign finance and donation behavior literature by undertaking a major data collection effort that goes far beyond traditional surveys and administrative records. It should be required reading for campaign finance scholars and campaign practitioners alike.
