Gender and Small Contributions: Fundraising by the Democratic Freshman Class of 2018 in the 2020 Election

See Rutgers Center for Women and Politics (CAWP). For 2000–2018, see https://​cawp.​rutgers.​edu/​sites/​default/​files/​resources/​canwincong_​histsum.​pdf

There are two complications in how small contributions are reported and categorized by the Federal Election Commission (FEC). First, only when a donor’s contributions to a given candidate surpass the $200 federal reporting threshold does the FEC begin tallying the donor’s contributions in the candidate’s total of large (itemized) donations. Small contributions the donor made prior to reaching the threshold remain in the candidate’s total of unitemized contributions. Thus, some small donations to a candidate are given by donors who might eventually surpass the $200 threshold for the candidate (Alvarez et al. 2020). Second, some candidates apparently itemize all individual donations, large and small alike, leading to “the systematic underreporting of unitemized receipts” (Keena and Knight-Finley 2019, 136; see also Culberson et al. 2019). However, neither of these complications seems fatal for our purposes. Regarding the first, the candidate’s sum of unitemized contributions is, at a minimum, a strong estimate of his or her ability to mobilize small donations. Regarding the second, there is no theoretical reason to believe that underreporting of small contributions is systematically related to the variables of interest in our analysis, and any such underreporting would only make more conservative our description and analysis of these contributions.

We define a close contest as one in which a candidate received between 45 and 55% of the vote.

The outliers are Randy Bryce (who ran in WI-1), Andrew Janz (who ran in CA-22), and Daniel O’Connor (who ran in OH-12). All three of these candidates raised nearly $5 million in small donations, putting each more than 8 standard deviations from the mean. Despite the impressive fundraising hauls, all three lost their contests.

There are clues that women donors were central to fueling the extensive small-dollar fundraising of female Democratic non-incumbents in 2018. For example, a post-election analysis by ActBlue, the online fundraising platform that funnels many small contributions to Democratic candidates, reported that 60% of donors who contributed to congressional candidates during the 2017–18 cycle identified as women. See https://​report.​actblue.​com/​

We downloaded the 2020 file from the FEC on August 25, 2020, as late in the summer as we could and still meet the submission deadline for the paper. For each candidate, the data includes the most recent report filed by a House candidate. For the bulk of candidates, the end of coverage data is June 30^, 2020.

Female donors have continued to play a critical role as donors. See Haley 2019. https://​www.​opensecrets.​org/​news/​2019/​07/​women-donors-q2-2019/​

The results are similar, although many of the coefficients don’t achieve statistical significance at conventional levels, when we use the dollar value of unitemized contributions as the dependent variable instead of unitemized contributions as a share of total receipts.

The dependent variable includes contributions from all PACs: corporate, trade-membership-health, labor, and non-connected committees. It may be that measuring Y as contributions only from corporate and trade-membership-health PACs—which many newly-elected Democrats oppose—would yield stronger results, as many Democratic candidates running in 2018 rejected corporate PAC money (Godfrey 2018).