Don’t Blame Our Toxic Politics on Online Fundraising

Not all elected officials who are powered by small donors are populist demagogues.

If money is the mother’s milk of politics, then the Internet is every politician’s best friend. In 2000, which was arguably the last pre-Internet election, just 777,000 people — one-quarter of one percent of all adult Americans — gave $200 or more to federal candidates, PACs or party committees. In 2020, more than 4.7 million people contributed $200 or more. Millions more give smaller amounts, with roughly 15 million unique donors reported on the Democratic side alone by fundraising clearinghouse ActBlue during that election cycle. (WinRed, the main GOP counter to ActBlue, doesn’t release individual donor data).

What happened between 2000 and 2020? First, people learned from using big consumer websites like eBay and Amazon that it was safe to spend money online. And then campaigns discovered how much easier to was to raise money online and they poured resources into figuring out how to do that most effectively.

According to Tim Miller, a Republican political consultant who has in recent years become a top critic of Donald Trump, this is terrible news. Last week, in a big opinion piece published by The New York Times, he took a flame-thrower to the entire landscape of…