December 1, 2020

Trump Can’t Understand How Biden Beat Him So Badly. Here Are 360 Million Reasons.

Biden’s small-dollar fundraising operation shows a record level of grassroots support.

President Donald Trump drives a golf cart as he plays golf at Trump National Golf Club, Friday, Nov. 26, 2020, in Sterling, Va. Alex Brandon/AP

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As Donald Trump and his elder sons continue to toss out outlandish claims that the election was rigged, the president has repeatedly returned to the argument that fraud must have occurred because Joe Biden couldn’t have legitimately received a record-breaking 80 million votes.

Only fraud can account for Biden’s record-breaking vote total, the Trumps contend.

The Trumps seem intent on measuring a candidate’s ground game and enthusiasm by counting the number of campaign events he held and attendance at those rallies. But there’s a far better method: looking at donations, particularly small-dollar donations (which in the political world are donations of less than $200). And reviewing Biden’s fundraising numbers shows clearly that he had a historic level of grassroots enthusiasm fueling his campaign. 

Political operatives have long known the value of drumming up small donations and using them to measure enthusiasm. For starters, small-dollar donors tend to be more representative of the middle-and-working class. And it’s one thing to tell a pollster you like a candidate, place a free sign on your front lawn, or attend a free rally, but contributing represents another level of commitment and voter activation. Contributing also requires the donor to provide the campaign with contact information and other personal details that help enormously with ongoing outreach.

The Trumps recognize this themselves—Brad Parscale, who until July served as Trump’s campaign manager, built the Trump 2020 campaign into a massive small-dollar-fundraising and data-harvesting operation. It just fell short against Biden’s.

Here are the hard numbers. We know that by mid-October (the final fundraising data is still rolling in), Biden’s team had raised about 38.8 percent of the campaign’s haul from small-dollar donors. Only two candidates have ever raised a larger percentage of their campaign cash this way—Barack Obama in 2012 (42.6 percent) and Trump in 2020 (45 percent). But Biden raised far more ($363.3 million) from these small donors than did Obama ($234.3 million) or Trump ($260.1 million).

Trump did receive a historic number of votes for an incumbent president. He also raised a historic amount from small donors for a serving commander-in-chief. Biden just raised—and won—more. 

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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