A Tale of Four Political Donations
Running for office completely changed the way I look at political donations and how I judge candidates by their donations. I’d like to share with you a candidate’s view of the donation process, how I pitched for donations, and then talk about the different emotional responses to different donations. My individual donation limit was $400 while organizations could donate $500.
Joss Whedon — $400
Yes, that Joss Whedon. I never got to meet him but in 2018 he put together an initiative called One Vote At A Time where he gathered a group of promising women film makers and sent them forth to make hundreds of campaign videos for Democratic candidates. They would interview you about your platform and if they liked you they would quote you a video. If you bought the video then a network of donors organized by and including Mr. Whedon would donate to your campaign the cost of the video while he mentored them on film making. Everybody wins.
Now I technically didn’t qualify for their services because I was making a point of abstaining from gun politics and they were specifically boosting Gun Sense candidates. HD-44 is a very pro-gun district. However I got them interested in my plans to use transparency to stop prescription drug price gouging and then pitched them the same argument I use on local second amendment enthusiasts. The Colorado House has a large Democratic majority already. All the partisan stuff will sort out the same way regardless of which of us wins. What matters is everything else. Check out my everything else! Though I did not win my race my campaign built connections that I used to help lobby for the passage of a law that stops price gouging on insulin.
Pat Stryker — $400
This check in the mail was very confusing. I don’t remember speaking to a Pat Stryker. She’s not on my contact list. And the donor info attached shows she doesn’t live anywhere near my district. Not that I don’t appreciate the money but … huh? Turns out that Mrs. Stryker is a billionaire heiress who every election, without fail, sends out a check to every Democratic candidate in Colorado. Every single one. From Governor to dog catcher. Whether your race is a shoe in, a nail biter, or a lost cause if you run on the Democratic ticket in Colorado you’ll get funding from Stryker. No fuss, no muss, no obligation, she didn’t even look at my platform or personally write the check. She has people for that.
Pipe-fitter’s Union — $500
My endorsement interview was in an AFl/CIO workshop with a gaggle of 9 other folks running in long shot races. We were not worth individual attention and might not even get endorsements — forget funds. So how the heck did I get a donation? It came down to my answer to this question:
What is your plan to win your election?
Everyone else talked about “Blue Waves” and being “Candidates of the People”. Their plans boiled down to, “I will somehow magically win my R+30 district by you giving me money!”. Uh huh. Sure you will dear. Have a cookie.
I acknowledged my chances were pretty poor but argued that there is more to running than just winning. HD-44’s population is exploding and the new arrivals are coming from very blue places like California, Washington, and Austin. Nobody is doing any registration or GOTV efforts here because everyone knows we are “hopeless”. It’s a self fulfilling prophecy. My campaign is basically a targeted voter registration effort. Look at these numbers! 5th largest net growth in voter registrations of any HD in the state and thats with Republican registrations dropping! I am registering massive numbers of people and they break blue overwhelmingly. Think about the state level races - Governor, AG, SoS, Treasurer. By helping me you help them. And you help make the district competitive in the future. And who knows, I could win. (I did not).
Private Citizen — $20
At the end of a house party an attendee came up with a $20 donation. I thanked him and he said that he’d gone to an event last month and wanted to donate then but didn’t have the funds so he’d saved up this pay period to be able to afford to donate. Then he started talking about how awesome it’s going to be when I win while radiating pride that he’d contributed to it.
Which One Of These Donations Was Problematic?
If you were to ask Senator Sanders which one of these donations was inappropriate he’d probably point to “bill-yah-naire” Stryker with a snarky comment or two for Whedon as an out of touch, Hollywood, elite. He would then proceed to question my integrity and trustworthiness for accepting that money. As he does.
I, meanwhile, would look at him like he’s crazy. These are the two lowest stress donations I got. To paraphrase president elect Joe Biden, Stryker and Whedon have so much money that when they give some to me nothing changes for them. In a very real sense I didn’t take anything away from them. I was doing a thing. They helped out in a way that took not a single second of their personal time by contributing an amount of money they could lose in the couch cushions without noticing. I feel a greater sense of obligation to my volunteers than I do to either of them.
We used to have a word for getting funding to do things primarily from the people who can easily afford it. Progressive. It doesn’t seem to mean that anymore.
I think that the guy who gave me $20 is the morally questionable donation. That was the one that had me staring at the ceiling unable to sleep that night. That was the donation that ended me asking for donations at my events (to my campaign treasurer’s intense frustration). He made personal sacrifices to donate an amount of money that was difficult for him to afford based on unrealistic expectations. I did nothing to create those expectations — I never claimed we had this thing in the bag and I always stressed that no matter what happened we were building a foundation and showing HD-44 could be competitive — but I didn’t correct him either. Lying by omission. This is completely different than the unions who donated to me from their limited funds with eyes open. I made them reasonable promises that I delivered on. He was using giving me money to assert his value as a human being. The intensity of his emotions made him so vulnerable to manipulation and being the focus of them was deeply uncomfortable.
Of course this very thing is why Sanders would look at me like I’m the crazy one. Here I am suffering pangs of conscious over $20 when he’s taken over ten million donations totaling nearly half a billion dollars across two primaries where he was mathematically eliminated by Super Tuesday each time. Contrary to his highly paid astro-turf messaging Sanders is the big money candidate. He tremendously outspent both Biden and Clinton. He regressively raised much more money than they progressively raised both times. And then set it on fire in hopeless contests that he lost even harder the second time than he lost the first time.
He specifically targets the unemployed and people living paycheck to paycheck with his fund raising efforts and incentivizes them to give with impossible promises. Things he has publicly admitted that even if elected he has no idea how he could possibly deliver on. Of course that is on top of lying about his chances of winning. Remember in 2016 when he was telling folks that he was going to win California so hard that Clinton would be non-viable and he’d make up his 4 million popular vote shortfall there? And then she won by over 5 points just like the polls said she would? He took from people’s need to fund this bullshit. Not their excess.
And this doesn’t bother him at all. In fact he’s proud of it. There is only one national politician better than Sanders at shamelessly prying money from people who can’t afford to give it.
Donald Trump.
