Washington—The 2020 presidential election is still 20 months away, but one campaign battle is already raging: the fight for America’s small-dollar contributions.
With all 12 major Democratic White House candidates shunning donations from corporations and political action committees, or PACs, they have turned their collective eye toward individual voters, who are showing increasing willingness to open their pocketbooks and play a larger role in the political process.
All signs point to an avalanche of personal contributions in the 2020 election cycle as individuals invest more of their own cash in candidates, as polls show voters are overwhelmingly fed up with dark money and corporate influence in politics.
“The money in politics is corrupting. It controls everything,” Senator Kirsten Gillibrand told voters in Des Moines, Iowa, last month after announcing her presidential bid.
“You have to get money out of politics. And that’s why, as a very small first step, I’m not taking corporate PAC money.”
Instead she and others, armed with massive voter databases culled from social media and other contacts thanks to improving technology, are sending out millions of fundraising emails seeking contributions to fund their exhausting ground operations —“even just a dollar,” pleaded one such message from Democrat Cory Booker.
Bernie Sanders, the liberal senator who made campaign finance reform a central pillar of his rebellious 2016 presidential campaign, entered the 2020 race in February with a bang, raising $5.9 million in the first 24 hours from more than 220,000 individuals across all 50 states. The average donation was $27.
“Powerful special interests may have the money,” he tweeted, “but we have the people.”
Donald Trump, of course, is not sitting idle. The president filed his candidacy for 2020 the day after his inauguration, and his campaign has been fundraising ever since, reportedly raising some $106 million by last October.