Power Grab - Jason Chaffetz Page 0,46
fund-raising is called ActBlue. The New York Times calls ActBlue the “piggybank of the Democratic resistance,” having raised a mind-blowing $1.6 billion for Democratic candidates in the 2018 cycle.
ActBlue is a technology company founded in 2004 that uses inventive online fund-raising software to distribute donations to Democrat candidates and causes at the federal, state, and local levels. What was once an inconvenient and unwieldy process to donate to multiple campaigns can now be done with the click of a button. According to the ActBlue website, their mission is to “democratize power and help small-dollar donors make their voices heard in a real way.”
According to ActBlue’s own numbers, the website facilitated 42,093,173 individual contributions during the 2018 election cycle, with an average contribution size of $39.50. There are 14,997 individual groups raising money on ActBlue—that number includes local, state, and federal campaigns as well as 501(c)(4) organizations doing political work on behalf of Democrats. These donations represented huge infusions of cash that likely made the difference on election night. Indeed, ActBlue brags on its website:
Small-dollar donors proved over the past two years that people power is a winning strategy. Grassroots donors fueled the Democratic takeover in the House, as well as hundreds of victories at the state level. In total, these donors gave more than $1.6 billion through ActBlue during the 2018 election cycle—double the 2016 cycle total—and powered the campaigns and organizations changing the direction of our country.
It’s a great narrative. The little guy is taking back power from the corporate Super PACs imposed on America when the Supreme Court ruled in Citizens United that campaign donations were protected speech.
One problem: Some of it is smoke and mirrors. It’s not just little guys using ActBlue. Studies show most of the money comes from coastal states. An analysis of campaign finance data by FiveThirtyEight and the Center for Public Integrity reviewed 38 million FEC records of ActBlue contributions between January 2017 and October 2018. Their analysis revealed:
Since the beginning of 2017, donors in states Clinton won have given $157 million to support House and Senate candidates running in states Trump won. That’s more than five times the amount of cash flowing from Trump states to Clinton states.
Donors in California and New York combined to contribute roughly one-third of the dollars that have flowed through ActBlue to House and Senate candidates since the beginning of 2017.
Fifty-seven percent of dollars directed to congressional candidates via ActBlue went to out-of-state races.
The study went on to identify hundreds of donors who had contributed more than 500 times during one election cycle, with some contributing thousands of times. Instead of making large donations to local candidates, coastal elites in the Democratic archipelago that runs from urban New England through America’s large coastal cities and over to the Pacific Coast are dividing their donations into smaller amounts to create the illusion of broad support from the little guy. Under H.R. 1, each of those donations would be matched 6-to-1 from the Freedom from Influence Fund, giving Democrats a huge advantage.
For their part, Republicans are far behind the curve on technology to facilitate small-donor contributions. It’s no secret that technology entrepreneurs overwhelmingly lean left. Academic research backs that up, with one study finding more than 75 percent voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016. Democrats have long had the advantage in deploying cutting-edge technology.
The Republican alternative to ActBlue, reportedly called Patriot Pass, is expected to be up and running in 2019. President Trump himself has shattered records for small-dollar donors, but 2020 is expected to be the first cycle in which the Republican Party will embrace a one-click donation platform.
For all the talk about reducing the influence of big donors in elections, the real motivation for public campaign financing provisions in H.R. 1 is to stack the deck in favor of Democrats and ensure their permanent hold on power.
The DISCLOSE Act
Now we get to the part where Democrats manage to go so far that they even lose the ACLU. Perhaps confident in their ability to rely on small-dollar donors and the corresponding 6-to-1 match from financial institutions through the payment of federal fines, they decided to include language in this bill exposing the dark money donors of nonprofits like the ACLU. They incorporate the provisions of a previous bill known as the DISCLOSE Act (Democracy Is Strengthened by Casting Light on Spending in Elections Act), which imposes mandatory disclosure of private associations.
They even went a step further, according to the ACLU’s letter to lawmakers opposing the bill. They expanded