So here we are. So much of the last 24 months has been about the Trump opposition rebuilding its energies, pacing its morale, marshaling its resources, building walls as firm against autocracy as possible with no power in Washington and preparing for the shot at reclaiming as much of that power as possible. In a week and a day we’ll get the first measure of the results. And we’ll get our first look at how the table is set for the next two years.
I wanted to return to the topic we discussed at the end of last week — the Democratic email and text fundraising colossus — but now from a different perspective. I wrote a response to Adam Bonica and Jake Grumbach’s piece in The New Republic about all the problems with the system. While I don’t agree with every point, it’s a very valuable article and points toward at least two straightforward if challenging-to-implement reforms. But we also shouldn’t lose sight of what an amazing accomplishment and how incredibly needed Democratic small donor fundraising is. It is a genuinely mass-based, non-oligarch system of funding political campaigns at a time when the Supreme Court has given billionaire oligarchs free rein to buy campaigns and offices at scale.
It used to be that while billionaires leaned right, both parties got a lot of money from them. That has now changed decisively. It’s difficult to overstate how much billionaires dominate Republican campaign funding. We’re talking about a few dozen families and, at the highest tier, a small handful of men. What gets less play is how much Democrats now dominate “small-donor” giving, largely directly to campaigns — money that goes much further in the heat of a campaign because these “hard dollars” are guaranteed the lowest ad rates whereas unregulated SuperPAC money has to bid on ad space at multiples-higher prices. We’ve been hearing for months that the one bright spot for the GOP this cycle, amidst all the gloom, is their massive fundraising advantage. And that’s true. And it may end up blunting a Democratic wave. But what has kept Democrats in the game is small-donor giving, which has dwarfed that to Republican candidates.
Examples from Texas illustrate the broader pattern. Republicans have poured more than $200 million into Texas since early September, with that total coming overwhelmingly from Elon Musk. Meanwhile, James Talarico’s campaign raised $64 million in the 3rd quarter of 2026, compared to $18 million for Ken Paxton. That outside GOP funding still dwarfs both campaigns. But when you figure in the different ad rates, Democrats can at least keep in the fight. This isn’t an exception. Peggy Flanagan in Minnesota is the only Democrat in a competitive Senate contest who was out-raised in the third quarter.
We should be clear that this isn’t a “Les Mis” fundraising base. You have some working-class and lower-middle-class contributors chipping in $5 and $10 amounts. But the bulk of it is middle class people or ranging to what we might call professionals of mere wealth, by which I mean people who live very comfortably and might fairly be called rich but still aren’t in the class of people who judge wealth in multiples of tens of millions of dollars. All of this allows Democrats to live off the land, or rather on their supporters, people who have economic and cultural interests like everyone else but aren’t mostly motivated by transactional motives in political giving.
For myself, I find this genuinely inspiring, in part because I have some acquaintance with the older system when there wasn’t even really a system for ordinary people to get involved in this part of the political process. And really, to the extent it’s inspiring or a positive thing, that’s all the more reason to, as Bonica and Grumbach argue, not burn it out with a mix of over-asking and not sufficiently policing scammers in the system. Put simply, if it weren’t for this class of donors and the apparatus that has grown up to collect their donations, Democrats would have no choice but to bid for the support of the same billionaires who now act so transparently as organized super-wealth, especially now that they are cut off so much even from the merely super-rich.
A final point: in response to the discussion last week, I’ve heard a lot of you say, okay these percentages are terrible, how should I contribute the few dollars I have? The simplest answer is never to contribute to PACs. Only contribute directly to campaigns. And don’t wait for them to seek you out by email or text. Either go to ActBlue and look them up or go directly to their websites and contribute that way. This isn’t because SuperPACs are bad, though it’s in the PAC and unregulated money space where most of the scammers operate. It’s because SuperPACs are really vehicles for big unregulated donations. They’re for the super rich or rich organizations. If you’re operating in tens or hundreds or even thousands of dollars, give that money directly to campaigns. Those dollars go much further, because of the ad rates issue we discussed above. And there’s no middle man. Again, it’s like taking your $1,000 of savings and trying to put it into private equity or a VC fund rather than an index fund. It’s not for you! Give it directly to a campaign.
I’m not saying it never makes sense to give to PACs. Maybe there’s a specific issue you’re really focused on — climate, abortion rights, democracy, immigration — and you’re certain the organization is solid. But again, especially if you’re someone who follows politics, the default should be to give money directly to campaigns. It’s much more efficient. You take out the middleman. And you eliminate the biggest source of places that just churn your money in ways where little ends up going to actual candidate.