While GOP presidential candidates still have eight months before the first nominating contest, a more imminent battle is emerging online for small-dollar donors.
These donors, who can both signal campaign strength and provide funds to help sustain a candidate through next spring, have become a vital part of a modern campaign operation. The jockeying over them comes against a backdrop of Republicans long trailing their Democratic counterparts when it comes to online fundraising.
Former President Donald Trump, the leading Republican primary candidate, was generally an exception.
Now, as a growing field of GOP candidates sets out to build small-dollar donor bases of their own, they also have an opportunity to rewrite the playbook.
Trump won his base through an aggressive brand of messaging: Promises of donation matches that never seemed to materialize or all-caps urgent language. But the burgeoning GOP field sees an opportunity to approach fundraising differently. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley are all using slightly different tactics to dethrone small-dollar Don.
They have to. Their political futures depend on it. And the limelight of the primary provides a unique opportunity for Republican digital fundraising, with implications for 2024 and beyond.
“It’s going to expose more donors to these candidates who are rising stars in the party,” said Eric Wilson, managing partner of Startup Caucus who also worked on Marco Rubio’s 2016 presidential campaign.
Trump starts off as the small-dollar king
No one has a better history with small-dollar donors than Trump, who has led in every major poll of the GOP primary field so far. His various committees reaped online donations from more than 780,000 distinct donors in 2021 and 2022, according to a POLITICO analysis of FEC data from WinRed, the main Republican donation processing platform, more than any other federal candidate or committee.
Still, Trump’s fundraising since his campaign launch has been uneven. He saw a massive surge in contributions to his joint fundraising committee after the FBI searched his Mar-a-Lago property last August, but also spent significantly more on text messaging and other donor outreach methods over that period, according to FEC filings. His November campaign launch yielded lower daily fundraising than after the Mar-a-Lago search.
But the former president’s indictment by a New York grand jury in late March helped revitalize his fundraising, his latest FEC report showed. Further legal troubles — including the possibility of another indictment related to classified documents held at Mar-a-Lago — could again boost him when it comes to raising money online.
DeSantis’ big first day
DeSantis, who formally jumped into the race on Wednesday, raised $217 million during his last reelection, the most of any gubernatorial candidate ever — although not all of that translates to the federal level. Florida campaign finance law does not cap donation amounts and allows contributions directly from corporations, which is banned for presidential candidates.
Still, DeSantis’ campaign said he raised more than $8 million in the first 24 hours after launching his presidential campaign via a technically-challenged Twitter Space, although it’s not clear how much of that share was driven by small-dollar donors. His campaign also spent thousands of dollars on Facebook ads in the days after his launch, mostly asking for donations of $47, a nod to his hopes of becoming the 47th president.
An early fundraising email from his campaign used the subject line “unlike any other presidential campaign, friend,” and promised to treat donors as “part of our team” rather than a “piggy bank.” Such an appeal certainly does not mirror Trump’s fundraising emails. But it did make DeSantis sound a lot more like a few of his other Republican opponents, with Haley’s campaign noting similarities with an email she had sent months earlier.
Haley leans into family and policy
For candidates new to a federal campaign, there is more work in building an initial list of supporters. Haley, who raised just shy of $800,000 from small-dollar donors in the first quarter, has similarly targeted donors with ads on Facebook, and her joint fundraising committee spent more than $200,000 on list rentals in the first quarter.
Her campaign has been among those most active via texting, with the content often featuring updates, surveys and messages from her husband. A recent 213-word text message themed around the upcoming Memorial Day holiday included bullet points on the former U.N. ambassador’s policy plans for veterans.
Nikki Haley addresses a campaign gathering, May 24, 2023, in Bedford, N.H. Haley’s campaign has been among those most active via texting, with the content often featuring updates, surveys and messages from her husband.