Investing to Win launches today to fix the broken Democratic fundraising machine designed to pay consultants, not win elections. Read about it in Semafor from Dave Weigel’s Americana newsletter this morning:
While we often ask you to contribute to the highest-ROI House candidates flipping Trump districts, today we are asking you to educate some of the 10 million donors who contribute to Democrats online every cycle. Read the brief on InvestingToWin.org and watch this video overview:
Then share! This is a community problem and a market problem. There are billions of dollars trading hands, and the incentives are wrong every step of the way. So money gets siphoned away from candidates by big tech companies and niche consultancies, and away from beating swing district Republicans towards padding the coffers of safe-seat Democrats.
Those are two of the Seven Deadly Sins of Democratic Fundraising detailed on InvestingToWin.org.
Money doesn’t go to beating GOP
When money does reach actual candidates, it flows disproportionately to the wrong ones. The top 8 fundraising House Democrats outside of leadership raised more than $18 million in 2024, compared to $11 million for their Republican counterparts. Sounds like an advantage, but it isn’t. Ninety-one percent of that Democratic money went to races where the presidential result was decided by 18 points or more. Meanwhile, Republicans raised money for competitive races.
The Middlemen Problem
The biggest lesson we’ve learned since we started studying swing-district Democratic overperformers: the market isn’t built for them.
Digital fundraising is controlled by the middlemen - like data brokers, who sell your email address and cell phone number, and giant companies like Meta who rake in the advertising fees. That works fine if you are in a seat that Kamala Harris won by 40 points and just take the Acela down to DC when Congress is in session. It does not work when you are a Win The Middle candidate trying to flip a rural district won by Trump.
WelcomePAC candidates can’t just pad their coffers and build up lists over time, working all those middlemen to get the best rates. They need the money now to beat MAGA.
Here’s an example of how the math works for a candidate who has $100,000 to invest in digital fundraising:
$30,000 on a consulting firm ($5,000 a month for six months)
$40,000 buying 400,000 phone numbers at ten cents per record.
$30,000 sending texts at a cent and a half per send, blasting those numbers five times each.
On a good day, the first-time candidate will eventually get back $120,000 in donations. So the consulting firm made $30,000 and the data vendor made $40,000 and the texting platform made $30,000.
And the candidate has $20,000 in net profit, which they’ll be told to put back into buying more emails.
Let’s Invest to Win
We have a solution. Our due diligence process has the best record in politics: we identify the overperformers. But we needed to educate the millions of Democratic donors who want to beat MAGA, but mostly get nonsense emails from Scam PACs and safe seat progressives.
So WelcomePAC spent the last year building a database of Democratic donors, starting with someone who knows the problem. Adam Frisch was the first candidate we ever endorsed, and became a case study of both how the market is broken and how it can be fixed. In 2022, our own Lauren Harper Pope was in The Bulwark and CNN and The Washington Post arguing that Adam needed just a few more bucks to beat Lauren Boebert - but the middlemen were directing more than $10 million to the challenger against the unbeatable Marjorie Taylor Greene in a deep red seat.
After losing by just a few hundred votes, Adam built one of the best digital fundraising operations with more than 300,000 donors in the 2024 cycle. And then he brought that base & expertise to WelcomePAC, giving this Investing To Win program a head start that we’ve built on over the last year.
We are building a machine that gets your money where it is needed most AND where 100% of the money goes to candidates. No middlemen allowed.
We want you to Give Smart. But today, we most want you to get smart and build this community by sharing.
Responsibility to Win was the theme of WelcomeFest last June, gathering the community of leaders who deliver majorities. Digital fundraising is one area where Democrats have been flat-out irresponsible.
Deciding to Win came out in October with the most comprehensive breakdown of how Democrats alienated the majority of Americans from 2012-2024. Many of the lessons there are seen in the disastrous fundraising ecosystem.
You are responsible, and you have decided to win. Now let’s grow our community so we can Invest to Win at the level needed for this November and beyond.