Women build political clout as big donors
Women are bankrolling political campaigns this year more than ever, driven by their rising rank in the workplace, boosts in women’s wealth, and networks set up to gather their donations and bolster their influence.
In an election year when women could be a decisive force, the transformation is occurring at every level of political giving and in both parties, from grassroots supporters sending in a few hundred dollars to the rarefied ranks of ultrawealthy donors who fund super PACs.
Forty-three percent of all reported contributions to federal candidates for this election have come from women, according to an analysis of Federal Election Commission data by Crowdpac, a political crowdfunding website, higher than any election cycle on record. Women have also provided a fifth of all individual contributions to super PACs for this election, compared with just 1 percent in 2010. Clinton contributors
The increase is especially pronounced on the left, with the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton galvanizing female donors.
Close to half of Clinton’s “bundlers” — the volunteer fundraisers who solicit checks from friends and business associates — are women, compared with about a third of President Barack Obama’s 2012 bundlers. Nearly 60 percent of Clinton’s reported contributions, totaling $70 million, have come from women, according to Crowdpac, the most of any presidential candidate by far. (The tally does not include contributions too small to be itemized in election commission reports.)
In interviews, female donors in both parties described cascading cultural and economic changes that were driving their participation in political giving. More women are founding their own companies or rising to lead family businesses, or have already sold or retired from them.
“The fundraisers I went to in the late 1990s, it was mostly men writing the checks,” said Amy Rao, chief executive of a Silicon Valley data-management firm and a prominent Democratic donor. “Now it’s mostly women. And a lot of these women are younger. They work full time. They are writing their own checks.” Self-made women
Among Republicans, female donors are also playing a more significant role. Some of the largest contributors to super PACs in the Republican primary have been women.
“In a very short period of time, the landscape has changed for women,” said Christine Toretti, a longtime Republican donor in Pennsylvania.
Toretti and other prominent bundlers in both parties said their networks of potential donors, almost exclusively men until just a few years ago, were now composed mostly of other women. And more of them had earned their wealth on their own, in contrast to times when women were more likely to wield their spouses’ wealth or inherited money.
But while women are making more contributions than ever, they still significantly trail men in the magnitude of their giving, with about two-thirds of all the money raised by federal candidates in 2016 coming from men, according to Crowdpac data.