Janine Jackson interviewed Voting Booth's Ian Vandewalker about small donors for the May 17, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: If you ask people to boil down what "democracy" means, many will say, "One person, one vote." If powerful people, rich people, get more voice, it's not democracy. Even as practices and policies have moved us materially further from that reality, that's still the selling point. Even the reason the US can invade other places is they "don't believe in democracy like we do."
Now we see more and more people saying, “Well, democracy shouldn't actually mean everyone gets equal voice (but we would like to keep using the label).” You can forgive a person for being a bit confused. And since courts have declared that money is speech, you can forgive a person for being more confused. That's the landscape in which the latest fillip seems to be that people who give small amounts of money to political campaigns somehow have outsized voice?
Here to help us make sense of that is Ian Vandewalker. He's senior counsel of the Elections and Government Program at the Brennan Center for Justice. He joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Ian Vandewalker.
JJ: I will say, when I first saw the headline of your report, “Do Small Donors Cause Political Dysfunction?,” I thought, “Huh? Who would say that?” It turns out it's a number of folks, including author and New York Times writer Thomas Edsall, who wrote, “For $200, a Person Can Fuel the Decline of Our Major Parties.” And then David Byler at the Washington Postwrote, “Small-Dollar Donors Didn't Save Democracy. They Made It Worse.” So this is not like a subreddit, obscure line of thought. Before I ask you to engage it, putting the best face on it, what is the argument here?
IV: The argument is this contrarian line that you think small donors are democratizing, because anybody can be one. But if you look at who gets a lot of small money, it tends to be people who engage in disruptive antics, like Marjorie Taylor Greene or Matt Gaetz—people who try to attract a lot of attention with extremist or polarizing rhetoric. And so the argument is, what small donors are really doing is encouraging these people who are showboating, and not engaged in serious moderation or governance.
JJ: So the idea, though, is it that these small donors aren't real, that they're kind of orchestrated? That these folks are trying to get folks to just give $12 to make some kind of point? And it's not that actually it's people who can only give $12?
IV: Right, I mean, I think there's something here in that the media ecosystem that we live in, both the mainstream media and social media clickbait, does gravitate towards outrage and controversy and people screaming at each other. We all get these fundraising emails with all caps: “The world's going to come crashing down if you don't send me $12.”
So I think there are incentives in the media system that say to certain people, “I can engage a national small-donor fundraising base by saying crazy things.” That exists. Now, one of the critiques is that most small donors don't actually respond to that. Small donors tend to give to competitive races where they think they can help their party win control of a chamber of Congress or the White House.
JJ: So first of all, I like how you go right to the media ecosystem. I think a lot of folks go, "Well, there's a political system and there's a media system, and they're different." You're already saying, “No, these things are intimately integrated.”
IV: Yes, campaign fundraising doesn't happen in a vacuum. And, look, the internet has been a huge beneficial force for fundraising and allows people to connect across the nation to things that they believe in. But one of the other effects of that has been this clickbait world of, say the most outrageous thing in order to get the clicks and get the small-dollar fundraising.
There's a question whether these candidates that engage in this kind of extremist rhetoric, are they doing it for the small-dollar fundraising, or would they be doing it anyway, given who votes in their district?—I think is a question we should also look into.
JJ: There is a reality, there is a foot we can keep on base. And so what do you say in this piece about, when you actually investigate, are small donors causing political dysfunction? What did you find?
Ian Vandewalker: "Even though the amount of small money in the system has dramatically increased, the money from the biggest donors...has increased even faster."
IV: So first of all, there's lots of reasons for polarization, people moving farther to the right and left and other kinds of dysfunction. They have to do with gerrymandering and the media ecosystem and the parties making strategic choices about how they're going to engage their voter bases, and things that have nothing to do with campaign finance.
As I said, small donors, they give to people they've heard of, so one way to get heard of is to say crazy things, but it's certainly not the only way. Some candidates are trying to find policy solutions to the problems that face us. And the other thing we haven't mentioned yet is big donors. Even though the amount of small money in the system has dramatically increased, the money from the biggest donors, people who give millions, 10 millions, has increased even faster. So that's actually the biggest part of the campaign finance system, is the big money, and those people give to extremists as well.
So it's hard to say, when you look at all those facts together, that small donors are causing dysfunction or polarization, even though there are these notorious examples of extremists who raise lots of small money.
JJ: It just sounds weird to say that people who can give less, people who don't have a million dollars, their throwing in their money wherever they throw it is throwing off the system. It makes you ask, “Well, what's the system?” Is the system that only people who can afford to give tens of thousands of dollars should be included? It just sounds weird.
IV: Yeah, that's right. I think one of the things, the sort of thought experiments I like to do with these arguments is, well, replace small donor with voter, right? If small donors give a lot of money to a candidate because they believe in that candidate, OK, that's just like voters voting for a candidate because they believe in that candidate. And it's hard to say that that's, as you say, a problem with the system itself.
JJ: Obviously, every election year is important, but hoo boy, 2024. Thoughts for reporters who are going to be engaging this?
IV: Yeah, I think for reporters it's important to get away from the high profile anecdotes. It's easy to say, “Oh, Marjorie Taylor Green raised a bunch of small money,” but there's data out there that can show you, what are small donors actually doing across the entire system. And that's a very different story.
And as for reforms, the Brennan Center supports a small-donor public financing system that matches small donations. So it amplifies those amounts from regular people, to make them competitive with the big donors. And that changes the way the candidates fundraise, and makes them fundraise by essentially asking people in their communities for votes. And so it amplifies those regular people's voices, and engages a kind of connection between elected representative and constituent that's good for representative democracy, because politicians are listening to the voters in another way.
JJ: All right, then, and we'll have another conversation about the role of money in politics generally, and why do you have to have money to participate? That's a whole bigger conversation.
IV: Yes, definitely. There's a lot to say about the uniquely American way of running politics with private dollars and the biggest donors calling the tune.
JJ: All right, then. Well, for now, we've been speaking with Ian Vandewalker. He's senior counsel of the Elections and Government Program at the Brennan Center for Justice. Thank you so much, Ian Vandewalker, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
Janine Jackson: If you ask people to boil down what "democracy" means, many will say, "One person, one vote." If powerful people, rich people, get more voice, it's not democracy. Even as practices and policies have moved us materially further from that reality, that's still the selling point. Even the reason the US can invade other places is they "don't believe in democracy like we do."
