Politicians want your money as well as your vote
In the months since incumbent Republican Ted Cruz and his Democratic challenger, U.S. Rep. Colin Allred, launched their campaigns for U.S. Senate, no fewer than 464,000 people have stepped up to hand them money.
So are we talking about nearly a half-million spontaneous acts of generosity for the benefit of two politicians from Texas? Hardly.
The selling of candidates is not much different from the marketing of products ranging from pharmaceuticals to fertilizer. It’s kind of like waking up from a dream in which you were driving a new pickup and somehow your social media feed is overflowing with commercials about gleaming Silverados, F-150s or Tundras crawling up the side of a mountain or towing a travel-trailer through a national park.
Click on a news story about the Legislature or the governor, and suddenly you’re drowning in ads for somebody running for something. Click one of the ads, and the frequency increases exponentially. And if you stumble across a candidate or two you like and sign up for notifications about their campaigns or follow them on social media, they’ve got you.
Soon your email basket fills up with “URGENT!!” pleas for donations and breathless warnings that the very future of the republic rests on your shoulders alone. And the emails aren’t only from the candidates whose site you visited or whose Instagram posts you liked. It seems as if every politician from your candidate’s party — and some from the other one — has your email address and knows how to use it.
It doesn’t matter if you live in Texas and they’re running in Tuscaloosa, they’re still begging you for money.
The messages are about a subtle as a stubbed toe, and they can stretch the truth. And nearly every email comes with a button icon that with a single click whisks the recipient off to the donation page of the candidate’s website.
But does all that actually work? In just the comparatively narrow universe of the 2024 Texas campaign for U.S. Senate, there are 464,000 pieces of evidence suggesting the answer is yes — and there are still more than 61⁄2 months until the Nov. 5 election.
In that time, the campaign operatives for Allred and Cruz will be working to expand their donor lists. Not only that, but they’ll be going back time and again to ask for more from those who’ve already given.
Here’s why: Setting aside political action committees, known as PACs and super PACs, the most any one person can donate to a candidate for federal office is $3,300 for any given general election or primary race.
The Cruz camp, when it released its latest fundraising totals Wednesday, said the average donation for its 179,000-plus individual contributors was $35.73. The average amount from Allred’s 285,000 donors was $34.75, a scant 98 cents under the Cruz average.
That means nearly all of those donors, who are still on the short side of $3,300, can look forward to more emails from their candidate’s operation for the rest of the spring, all of summer and the first few weeks of fall.
And those who’ve maxed out are probably not off the email hook, either. Chances are if you’re a Democrat with the wherewithal to drop $3,300 in a politician’s collection basket, you’re going to know more than a few fellow Democrats in similar financial circumstances. Same holds on the Republican side.
All of the candidates, probably with the same fevered exigency as in the beginning of this year’s election cycle, will be asking people to call their friends and ask them to pony up, too. And those who do can be expected to be asked to reach out to their friends.
The reason the Cruz-Allred race was singled out for this example is it’s the highest-profile contest in Texas this year. Similar pleas for money are playing out in most, or perhaps all, of the state’s 38 congressional districts, even though only a fraction of them will be competitive.
And Texas, although a very expensive state in which to play politics, is not unique when it comes to money and campaigns. The November election will feature 33 other Senate races, along with every congressional district around the country. And that doesn’t even factor in the presidential election, in which the number of donors and the number of dollars will make even Texas look tiny by comparison.