I have in my memory the photograph of a smiling English suffragette collecting funds with a piggy bank. Even today, unions maintain their resistance funds. But membership dues, a sign of identification and commitment, are limited by the number of members. Not everything can depend on state funding or on so-called big donors. We must create digital piggy banks that allow ordinary citizens, humble people and especially young people to participate.
Funding of election campaigns now increasingly depends on small donations from ordinary people, from occasional contributions, equivalent to the price of a cup of coffee, to regular donations to support broader political objectives or social causes.
This shift, triggered by the rise of social media and other digital tools, is increasing civic engagement in political campaigns. And it has the added benefit of providing donors with a feedback about the initiatives they are expected to promote. The donor is no longer an anonymous individual who deposits his contribution to the cause in a piggy bank; technology allows for his identification and dialogue.
In Europe, there is still much to be done in harnessing mass donor participation as a campaign tool, and even more so when compared to political groups’ fundraising in the United States. To give an idea of the difference, between 2018 and 2021, small donations to European party groups made up less than 1% of total contributions. Broken down by group, these represent just 11% of total income for the finances of the European Christian Political Movement, 2% for Renew Europe and 1% each for the European Free Alliance, the European Green Party and Identity and Democracy groups respectively.
However, there have been some isolated success stories. In Italy, for example, the once-rising Five Star Movement outpaced its political rivals and raised almost €1m in EU funding during its 2018 presidential campaign. And in 2017 in the UK, the Momentum movement, which aimed to return Labour to its roots on the political left, owed its success in large part to an effective door-to-door campaign that doubled its membership in just 12 months.
On the other side of the Atlantic, however, small contributions are already a central feature of American politics, following a systematic upward trend for three decades. Today, they constitute a significant part of party finances: they represent, respectively, 40% and 31% of the total campaign funds of presidential candidates Kamala Harris and Donald Trump.
Arguably, the United States saw a major leap in the adoption of this method of financing in 2012, when Barack Obama raised 23,000 small-dollar donations in the first 24 hours of his re-election campaign.
This trend took off four years later with Bernie Sanders’ door-to-door campaigning. The Vermont senator raised $1.5 million (€1.39 million) in microdonations on the first day of his campaign and ended up receiving no less than $73 million (€67.7 million) from small donors by the end of the year. In 2020, donations of less than $200 were the main source of income for all presidential candidates.
Kamala Harris’s entry into the presidential race this month has brought this trend to its zenith, creating a roar in American politics with an explosion of small donations that has driven an unprecedented surge in fundraising for her campaign. After announcing her candidacy, Harris received an unprecedented $81 million in just 24 hours, donated by 880,000 supporters, of whom 528,000 were first-time donors. The Biden-Harris campaign as a whole raised $310 million in July alone. Of this amount, two-thirds came from first-time donors and 94% of donations were less than $200, bringing the total amount raised by both Democratic candidates to more than $1 billion. Never before has this figure been reached in such a short period of time.
Harris’s entry into the presidential race has highlighted a fundamental reality that European progressives should take note of: organisations and their members, essential instruments for organising struggles, are no longer sufficient.
Technology now makes it possible to incorporate two new key players: volunteers and donors, both of which complement each other. The pool of civic engagement is deeper than many suggest, and it is therefore time for parties and causes to open their doors beyond their members and invite anyone who wants to contribute, whether with their time, their voice or their money.
As Patrick Frank, who worked on the 2012 Obama campaign and now runs Lunda (a fundraising platform), puts it: “It’s not just about money.” When campaigns ask for donations, he says, “they’re asking for the donor’s help…to positively impact the world around them.” A donor needs to be able to communicate directly with them and to whom you need to make clear and forceful appeals, he notes. Essentially, it’s about getting people involved in a campaign, whether they’re physically there or not.
A shift towards EU funding could give Europe’s progressive parties the ammunition they need to mobilise citizens to support positive, people-driven causes that can be used to turn back the tide of right-wing populism.
The sudden change of fortunes of the American Democrats shows that we must work harder to involve the citizens of our democracies more in decision-making. The energy and campaigns of Harris, and other members of American progressivism, show what is possible when there is widespread commitment to a concrete cause. And, if we are truly committed to building movements that can bring about positive change here in Europe, we would do well to observe and integrate some of these practices into our party models.
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