Last Call For The Small Things Add Up Big

Democratic candidate fundraising platform ActBlue has just reported the most successful fundraising quarter of its kind in history: a staggering $1.5 billion raised in three months by individual donors to help Democrats in all 50 states.

 

Democratic candidates and left-leaning groups raised $1.5 billion through ActBlue over the last three months — a record-smashing total that reveals the overwhelming financial power small-dollar donors have unleashed up and down the ballot ahead of the 2020 election.

From July through September, 6.8 million donors made 31.4 million contributions through ActBlue, the Democratic Party’s favored online donation platform, averaging $47 per donation. More than 14,223 campaigns and organizations benefited from the surge in donations, the largest single quarter in the platform’s 15-year history, according to figures shared first with POLITICO. Just in September, ActBlue processed $758 million.

It’s the latest example of ActBlue’s exponential growth and how online fundraising is fundamentally reshaping politics. During the entire 2018 election cycle, ActBlue donors gave candidates and groups nearly $1.6 billion, a total almost matched in a single quarter this summer and fall.

Joe Biden is responsible for a large slice of the total, after announcing Wednesday night that his campaign, along with the Democratic National Committee and the campaign’s joint fundraising committees, hauled in $383 million in September, including $203 million that was raised online. It was the biggest fundraising month ever for a presidential campaign.

Jaime Harrison, a Democrat challenging South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, raised $57 million in the third quarter, breaking the record Beto O’Rourke set for the biggest-ever Senate fundraising quarter two years ago. Overall, donations to Democratic Senate candidates more than tripled in 2020 over the same period in 2018.

And the money stretches much further down the ballot. Contributions to state legislative candidates have also tripled in 2020 compared to the same period in 2018. Democratic state parties, once largely ignored and underfunded, also drew more than seven times the number of donors over the last three months than they did over that same period in 2018.

Democratic donor enthusiasm has transformed Biden’s campaign from an effort that once looked in danger of running out of money during the primaries to a juggernaut that has overtaken a sitting president. By August, Biden had topped Trump, who once held a nine-figure cash lead, in both fundraising and spending.

“Small-dollar donors are showing an unparalleled commitment to change,” Erin Hill, ActBlue’s executive director, said in a statement shared with POLITICO. “In the final weeks of the 2020 election, they are showing up and investing in races across the board. This people-powered movement will expand the map for Democrats for years to come and sets a powerful precedent for civic engagement. Small-dollar donors are leading the way to victory.”

One telling statistic from ActBlue: More than half of the unique donors who gave in the third quarter gave more than once. That frequency shows how small-dollar donors can turn into a renewable resource for candidates, who can extract a few dollars at a time multiple times throughout a campaign.

 

This is something that actually gives me a lot of hope, to know that Democrats are raising money the right way, not just through $50,000 per plate closed-door galas, but through open and transparent donations made by millions to give more than one billion.

 

And the real fight is going to be a state legislatures in preparation for 2022 redistricting, a fight that the Supreme Court has ruled must be left to states. We're going to be able to undo a lot of damage hopefully over the last ten years from the disaster of 2010.

And a lot of that is thanks to ActBlue.

Turkey Day Gets Trumped

Thanksgiving is going to be pretty rough this year for a lot of families, but between the election and COVID-19, it's probably worth listening to Dr. Fauci and consider skipping it this year altogether.

Coronavirus precautions will result in a very different kind of Thanksgiving for many people this year, himself included, Dr. Anthony Fauci said Wednesday.

“It is unfortunate, because that’s such a sacred part of the American tradition, the family gathering around Thanksgiving, but that is a risk,” Fauci, the nation's leading infectious disease expert, told CBS Evening News anchor Norah O'Donnell.

Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said that given the current spread of Covid-19 and the uptick in infections, people need to be very careful about social gatherings, especially older people and those with underlying conditions.

“You may have to bite the bullet and sacrifice that social gathering, unless you're pretty certain that the people that you're dealing with are not infected. Either they've been very recently tested, or they're living a lifestyle in which they don't have any interaction with anybody except you and your family,” he said.

He added that travel on planes and public transportation could increase exposure to the virus.

“My Thanksgiving is going to look very different this year,” Fauci noted.

 

Just stay home this year. It's not worth it.

 

Oh, and don't forget, this is Donald Trump's fault for the abysmal response by the federal government to an ongoing pandemic, now in it's tenth month, that we're no longer pretending exists.

Black Lives Still Matter, Con't

Above all, Donald Trump made it socially acceptable again to assault, harm, and even kill Black people because we are Black. And in 2020 hate crimes still happen.

 

Devin Freelon Jr. and two friends were playing music while walking to the parking lot in a waterfront park in Monroe County, Mich., when they saw a White man walking toward them.

“N------ don’t belong on this beach,” Lee James Mouat yelled at the boys, who are Black, on June 6, according to a criminal complaint released this week.


Mouat, 42, then grabbed a bike lock and struck Freelon, 18, in the face, said several witnesses. The blow knocked out several of Freelon’s teeth and shattered his jaw.

Federal prosecutors charged Mouat on Tuesday with a hate crime for “willfully causing bodily injury to an African-American teenager because of the teenager’s race.” If convicted, Mouat faces up to 10 years in prison.

The case is the latest hate-crime charge filed by federal prosecutors this year against White suspects accused of attacking Black people in racially charged assaults. Federal prosecutors charged a man in September for allegedly stabbing a Black man in Oregon, unprovoked, several times last December. A woman in Queens, who is accused of throwing a glass bottle at a Black woman who was jogging and yelling “go back to Africa” in August, also received hate-crime charges last month.

At least four people witnessed the alleged assault in Michigan, according to the criminal complaint written by Sean D. Nicol, a special agent with the FBI’s Detroit Division in Ann Arbor, Mich.

It was the evening of June 6, and Freelon and his two friends had been walking in William C. Sterling State Park, a public park with a lakeside beach about 35 miles south of Detroit, and listening to music on a portable speaker.

Two witnesses told the investigator that they heard a White man, later identified by police as Mouat, loudly complaining about the music, calling the boys the n-word and “monsters.”

“These n------ are playing gang music,” Mouat said, according to one of the witnesses. “I want to hit them with this cooler.” And, “I wish someone would say something to me so I can beat them.”

The second witness observed Mouat, who was walking with his family, approach the boys in the parking lot. The witness heard the man threaten to “bash their heads in if they don’t turn [their music] down,” he told the investigator.

 

The difference is there are federal hate crime laws, laws that need to be strengthened, and the strengthening of those laws continue to be blocked by racist white Republicans like Rand Paul who say racism is over, and that laws like this are more likely to be used against white people through false accusations.

Devin Freelon got his teeth smashed out for being Black.

But we don't need laws to protect us from assault and murder?

"But we already have laws against assault and murder, they still happen!" Well, we have laws against discrimination too, but that happens daily in America.

So maybe they need better punishment to keep them from happening?

Black Lives Still Matter.

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