About 200 House Democrats represent districts that voted for Kamala Harris in 2024. As Drew Savicki points out, all should be considered relatively safe:
But where is the vast majority of the money being donated to Democrats through ActBlue going?
The top political conversation these days concerns Republican gerrymandering, the practice of jamming all Democratic supporters into deep blue districts where their votes don’t matter. But Democrats are also hurting their chances of winning the House in the midterms by doing something similar: sending hundreds of millions of dollars to candidates and PACs in safe districts instead of to the candidates in tough races who can beat Republicans.
Let’s call this practice “donormandering.”
Democrats must fight gerrymandering. But to win, they also need to fight donormandering by being smarter about sending donations to candidates in competitive races.
For example, let’s look at Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She’s in a solidly blue seat and had the most unique contributors of any congressional candidate, with 736,389 individuals giving to her campaign. Let’s keep in mind that she won her race in 2024 by nearly 40 points. Now let’s look at Christina Bohannan, who is running in IA-01 in a toss-up race against serial underperformer Mariannette Miller-Meeks. Just 1,662 individuals have given to her campaign, which is less than 1% of the number of donors to AOC.
The real kicker? Bohannan lost by just 798 votes in 2024. If just a few dozen of the hundreds of thousands of AOC donors had given to Bohannan instead, we’d likely be talking about how Bohannan flipped a seat in 2024 and how Democrats would have another seat in Congress. Instead, small donors continue to give to AOC not because she needs it, but because she espouses policies that attract and excite people even if they have no chance of being enacted. What they don’t see, or don’t care to see, is that if Bohannan and other swing district Democrats don’t win their races then AOC won’t be able to pass any of her key priorities.
Read Gerrymandering Dollars for more on this phenomenon. 891 days until the next presidential primary, and just 430 days until the midterms.