I n C o l l a b o r at i o n w i t h t h e C a m pa i g n F i n a n c e I n s t i t u t e
Small Donors and Online Giving
A S T U DY O F D O N O R S TO T H E 2 0 0 4 P R E S I D E N T I A L C A M PA I G N S
T h e G r a d u at e S c h o o l o f P o l i t i c a l M a n a g e m e n t
I n C o l l a b o r at i o n w i t h t h e C a m pa i g n F i n a n c e I n s t i t u t e
Small Donors and Online Giving
A S T U DY O F D O N O R S TO T H E 2 0 0 4 P R E S I D E N T I A L C A M PA I G N S
T h e G r a d u at e S c h o o l o f P o l i t i c a l M a n a g e m e n t
www.IPDI.org
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This project was funded by the Joyce Foundation
and conducted by the Institute for Politics, Democracy
& the Internet (IPDI). We are grateful to the Joyce
Foundation and to Larry Hansen, the foundation’s vice
president, for support and encouragement.
The Carnegie Corporation of New York and the
Reform Institute provided supplemental funding, and
we are grateful for their continued support.
IPDI is the premier research and advocacy center for
the study and promotion of online politics in a manner
that encourages citizen participation and is consistent
with democratic principles. IPDI is non-partisan and
non-profit and is housed in the Graduate School of
Political Management at The George Washington
University.
The Campaign Finance Institute (CFI) was a partner
in this project. CFI provided access to its database of
political donors and expertise in the field of campaign
finance. CFI is a non-partisan, non-profit institute
affiliated with The George Washington University that
conducts objective research and education, empanels
task forces and makes recommendations for policy
change in the field of campaign finance.
This project benefited greatly from the advice and
assistance of many individuals.
We especially thank Bob Biersack, Alexandra
Cooper, Brendan Glavin, Marlinda Menashe and
Clyde Wilcox. John Green, director of the Ray C. Bliss
Institute of Applied Politics at the University of Akron,
graciously gave this project the names of small donors
his researchers had compiled. Hal Malchow and Larry
Hayes offered comments on early drafts.
Research assistance was provided by Lindsay
Baldwin, Julie Barko Germany, Chris Brooks, Lanny
Cardow, Peter Churchill, Kathleen Legg, Zachary
Morgan and Ryan Sullivan. Additional assistance
was provided by Andrea Bernal, Emily Browne, Jason
Cheberenchick, Julie Chung, Stephanie Macias,
Megan Norden and Ainsley Stromberg. Peter Churchill
supervised the survey mailing.
We offer special thanks to more than three dozen
political donors from across the country who spoke with
us at length about their motivations for participating in
the presidential campaign in 2004.
This report was written by Joseph Graf, Grant
Reeher, Michael J. Malbin and Costas Panagopoulos.
Graf is project director at IPDI; Reeher is associate
professor of political science at the Maxwell School
of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University;
Malbin is executive director of CFI and professor of
political science, State University of New York at Albany;
Panagopoulos is a post-doctoral fellow at the Institution
for Social and Policy Studies, Yale University.
The report was edited by Carol C. Darr, IPDI
executive director. The Institute is administered by
The George Washington University Graduate School of
Political Management. F. Christopher Arterton is dean
of the school.
For more information about the Graduate School
of Political Management visit www.gwu.edu/~gspm.
For more information about the Institute for Politics,
Democracy & the Internet visit www.ipdi.org. For more
information about the Campaign Finance Institute visit
www.cfinst.org.
Published March 2006.
Designed by On Deck Communication Studio LLC
of Alexandria, Virginia. (www.ondeckstudio.com)
SMALL DONORS AND ONLINE GIVING
| ACKNOWLEDGMENTS | PAGE i
www.IPDI.org
PAGE ii
| PREFACE | INSTITUTE FOR POLITICS, DEMOCRACY & THE INTERNET
www.IPDI.org
PREFACE
For the past five years the American public has
witnessed a revolution in the way political campaigns
are conducted in the United States. Over the course
of just three presidential election cycles we at the
Institute for Politics, Democracy & the Internet
have seen sweeping changes in how campaigns are
organized, campaign messages communicated and
money raised. The Institute’s charter rests on the belief
that these changes can promote citizen involvement in
the democratic process and greater accountability of
our elected leaders. Our research agenda is dedicated
to learning how best to stimulate and strengthen these
possibilities.
In March 2002 the Congress passed and the
president signed into law the Bipartisan Campaign
Reform Act, commonly known as BCRA or “McCainFeingold” for its primary sponsors, Sens. John McCain
and Russ Feingold. This landmark campaign finance
legislation was passed after years of political wrangling
and was only reluctantly signed by President Bush.
BCRA tried to set limits on contributions to the national
political parties. Those new limits created incentives
for party leaders and candidates to find new sources of
money within the restrictions of the law.
Heading into the election of 2004, it was widely hoped
that the Internet would foster a significant increase in
the number of people who gave small contributions to
political campaigns. Just as widespread participation at
the ballot box is considered healthy for our democracy,
so has popular widespread participation in fundraising
come to be seen as important. Contributions from small
donors connect each donor to political life and reduce
the appearance of elected officials being beholden to a
few wealthy donors.
But no one knew whether the number of small
donors would increase substantially and whether the
people who gave small contributions or who gave
money over the Internet would be different in important
ways from the major donors whose contributions have
dominated presidential campaigns of the recent past.
This project was prompted by a desire to understand
these small donors and Internet donors. Our intent was
to gather data on presidential donors in 2004 and then
to reflect on what online fundraising and BCRA might
mean for the future. The full effects of these changes
in political campaigning and campaign finance law are
only beginning to become apparent.
We consider our research part of an ongoing
conversation about money and politics, and we
welcome comments and opportunities for discussion
through our Web site (www.ipdi.org).
SMALL DONORS AND ONLINE GIVING
| PREFACE | PAGE iii
www.IPDI.org
PAGE iv
| TABLE OF CONTENTS | INSTITUTE FOR POLITICS, DEMOCRACY & THE INTERNET
www.IPDI.org
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgments ............................................................................................................................................i
Preface ................................................................................................................................................................iii
Executive Summary ......................................................................................................................................... 1
Introduction ...................................................................................................................................................... 3
Methodology .................................................................................................................................................... 7
Small and Large Donors ................................................................................................................................ 11
The Dynamics of Political Giving: Online and Offline .......................................................................... 17
Donor Motivations ....................................................................................................................................... 25
Online Behavior ............................................................................................................................................ 29
Political Involvement ................................................................................................................................... 31
Attitudes and Opinions ................................................................................................................................ 35
First-Time Donors ......................................................................................................................................... 39
Conclusion ..................................................................................................................................................... 43
Appendices ......................................................................................................................................................45
Sources...............................................................................................................................................................51
SMALL DONORS AND ONLINE GIVING
| TABLE OF CONTENTS | PAGE v
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PAGE vi
| EXECUTIVE SUMMARY | INSTITUTE FOR POLITICS, DEMOCRACY & THE INTERNET
www.IPDI.org
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
The 2004 election was a watershed in presidential
campaign fundraising under a landmark new regulatory
regime. The Campaign Finance Reform Act (BCRA),1
signed by President Bush in 2002, doubled how much
individual donors could contribute to federal candidates
but ended soft money contributions. The electorate
was sharply divided over President George W. Bush
and a war deeply unpopular with a substantial portion
of the voters. And the Internet continued its emergence
as a vehicle for political campaigns to inform, organize
and raise money.
The convergence of these events led to a surge
in political donors in the 2004 campaign, a dramatic
broadening of the donor base to encompass hundreds
of thousands of Americans who had never donated
before, and an accompanying increase in the number
of people donating money online. No one knew what
the results of these changes and the surge in political
giving would herald for this election. We believe that
2004 saw some important changes, facilitated in key
respects by the Internet, that suggest a democratizing
trend in political fundraising – but at the same time the
changes were not earthshattering. On the whole, we’re
left cautiously optimistic that these changes represent
a positive development that can grow in future election
cycles.
To study the 2004 donors, the Institute for Politics,
Democracy & the Internet together with the Campaign
Finance Institute conducted the Small Donors Survey.
In the fall and winter of 2005 researchers carried out
a wide-ranging national survey and dozens of personal
interviews with presidential donors. More than 1,500
donors completed surveys, including large numbers of
donors who contributed small amounts of money and
large numbers of donors who gave online. This report
offers a first picture of these groups of political donors,
of which we know very little – people who contribute
small amounts of money to political campaigns, usually
$100 or less (small donors); people who donate online
(online donors); and people giving for the first time in
2004 (first-time donors).
The project addresses the speculation that the
1
BCRA is the general acronym for Bipartisan Campaign Reform
Act of 2002.
crush of small donors may have introduced a polarizing
element into American politics. Conventional wisdom
held that small donors and new donors were more
angry and extremist than other donors. We did not find
that to be the case.
• At a time of polarized politics in America, small
donors and new donors were no more extreme
than other donors. The donor pool, as a whole,
is fairly polarized. Donors tend to congregate at
the ends of the political spectrum, whereas most
of the general public congregates in the middle.
Nonetheless, small donors are no more extreme
in their opinions than large donors and no more
likely than large donors to express animosity
toward the opposing candidate.
• While there was a surge in new donors in the
2004 campaign, there was a surge in old donors
as well, or donors who had given sometime in
the past. The 2004 campaign motivated many
people to donate for the first time, but not in a
proportion greater than in past elections. Lots of
old donors returned.
• There is a surprising amount of fluidity in the
donor pool. Almost one-quarter of the small
donors and 15 percent of donors who gave $500
or more were first-time donors. An additional
39 percent said they gave only some of the
time. For future candidates and fundraisers, this
introduces a greater level of unpredictability and
opportunity than we might have predicted in the
past.
Researchers have known for years that large
donors (generally defined as those who gave $200
or more) come from a socioeconomic elite. They are
much wealthier and more highly educated than typical
Americans. However, it has been unclear who made
up the pool of donors who gave smaller amounts of
money. We found that:
• Donors who gave smaller amounts of money
fall somewhere between large donors and
the general public. Small donors look more
like middle class Americans in terms of their
education and household income, although
SMALL DONORS AND ONLINE GIVING
| EXECUTIVE SUMMARY | PAGE 1
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donors still are higher in both respects.
• While the popular image of political campaigns
often focuses on youth, political donors in
general are middle aged and older and small
donors are no different. Less than 10 percent of
donors who gave less than $100 to a candidate
or campaign in 2004 were under age 35. Large
donors are typically older. Hardly anyone under
age 35 gives $500 or more.
The Internet has transformed how political
campaigns communicate with their supporters. In
2004 we found the Internet has become a tool to
organize and extend the influence of political activists.
The result has been an increase in grassroots organizing
via e-mail, house parties and online fundraising.
• In the 2004 presidential election, nearly all young
donors gave online – more than 80 percent of
those 18 to 34. While most donors are older, the
trend is clear. Online fundraising will be central
to the future of campaign fundraising.
• Unsolicited campaign contributions have
increased. Almost half of small online donors
contacted the campaign first. They did not get a
letter or phone call asking for money, but instead
sought out their candidate, usually online, in
order to show their support.
• People online are more likely to be asked to
donate money, and this sort of social pressure
is critical to get people to donate. It is pressure
that large donors encounter much more often
– a large donor is more likely to have a friend or
colleague ask them to give money to a political
candidate.
• People online are more likely to be politically
active. They are more likely to ask others to
support their candidate, and more likely to ask
others to donate money to a candidate.
• A quarter of all donors reported they attended
a political house party — evidence of the surge
in grassroots organizing. Disproportionate
numbers of online donors and first-time donors
attended house parties or Meetup.com events.
A quarter of donors who attended a Meetup
said it helped motivate them to give their first
contribution.
PAGE 2
•
Finally, online donors were the most influential
and activist of donors. They were more likely to
say they will return and be politically active in
2008.
In these ways, the Internet has helped level the
playing field between large donors and small donors.
Online political activism diminishes the tremendous
fundraising advantage enjoyed by long-term, large
donors who move in social circles of donors close to
the campaign and lobby on behalf of their candidate.
The Internet has helped small, less experienced donors
broaden their reach, and hence their influence with
others.
Finally, as we expected, the motivation for many
donations in 2004 was donor discontent. Rather than
giving money to support their candidate, many donors
gave money to oppose the other. This was especially
true for Democratic donors.
• Of donors who gave more than $500 in 2004,
80 percent of Kerry donors and 50 percent of
Bush donors contributed because “the opponent
was unacceptable.”
• Kerry donors offered less strong support for
Kerry than Bush donors offered the president.
For many, he was the only alternative to a
president they oppose.
The Small Donors Survey sheds new light on political
donors in America, especially small and online donors.
While small donors are still wealthier and more highly
educated than average Americans, the surge in small
donors has created a donor pool more representative
of the American electorate. The findings also re-focus
attention on the ability of the Internet to empower
political activists online. The Internet has helped level
the playing field between large donors, who have
enormous resources to help them engage in politics, and
small donors, who now have greater communication
tools and resources to make their voices heard.
Our data suggest that increasing numbers of small
donors are not a polarizing influence, pushing politics
and politicians to ends of the political spectrum. On
the contrary, we found reason to be optimistic about
changes in campaign funding for the years ahead.
| EXECUTIVE SUMMARY | INSTITUTE FOR POLITICS, DEMOCRACY & THE INTERNET
www.IPDI.org
INTRODUCTION
No other nation spends as much money as the
United States in the election of its political leaders,
and in no other nation is campaign fundraising
so conspicuous or so embedded in political life.
Fundraising is an overriding concern for candidates
and elected officials, and it takes up more and more of
their time. It has become increasingly sophisticated,
professionalized and successful. Fundraising success is
considered a prime indicator of a candidate’s viability,
and monitoring the money has become a staple of
political journalism. And for millions of Americans,
contributing money to a candidate or political cause
connects them to candidates and other supporters in a
simple act of political expression.
The presidential campaign of 2004 was a
watershed moment in political fundraising because of
the convergence of a new regulatory regime, a bitterly
fought campaign and closely divided electorate, and the
increasing sophistication of Internet technology. The
election was the first test of the Bipartisan Campaign
Reform Act (BCRA), which passed in 2002. BCRA
removed a huge source of funding for federal campaigns
– soft money – while doubling the limits of hard money
individual contributions to $2,000 per candidate.1 The
rancor of the 2004 election seemed a continuation of the
very close and bitter election in 2000, compounded by
a controversial war and a sitting president about whom
opinion was deeply polarized. National advertising by
independent advocacy organizations, so-called “527s,”
only added to the intensity. Finally, the election was
another step in the emergence of the Internet as a
vehicle for political campaigns to inform, organize and
raise money. More money was raised online than ever
before and Howard Dean became the first presidential
candidate to center his early efforts and cement his
early support online.
1
BCRA limited donors to federal candidates in 2004 to $2,000
per candidate in the primary and general elections, for a total
of $4,000 per candidate. (Major party presidential candidates
who accept public funding for the general election may not accept private contributions to their general election campaigns.)
The maximum aggregate amount that an individual could contribute to all party committees, candidates and PACs combined
was $95,000 for the 2004 election cycle. The limits for the 2006
cycle are $2,100 for contributions to candidates and a combined
aggregate limit of $101,400.
Dean’s campaign was remarkable for the community
of supporters fostered online who funded the campaign
and provided its early energy. The support, particularly
his dramatic lead in early fundraising, made him
the front-runner and put him in the spotlight of the
national press corps. Other candidates had discovered
the potential of raising money online in 2000 – John
McCain raised $2.2 million in the week after the New
Hampshire primary2 – but this was only a precursor
to 2004. Dean raised more money online than any
candidate before him, and raised a greater proportion
of his total campaign funds from donors giving $200
or less than any of the 2004 candidates except Dennis
Kucinich. Dean also raised more money than any other
Democratic candidate by the end of 2003, something
that typically assures a candidate of the nomination.
The other Democratic candidates relied on donors
who contributed $1,000 or more, which is the more
traditional early fundraising path for presidential
primary candidates.
Dean’s campaign collapsed after the Iowa caucuses,
but the surge of small donors was not confined to his
campaign, which in itself is unusual. Third party or
outsider candidates have often relied on small donors.
John Anderson in 1980, Pat Robertson in 1988, Pat
Buchanan and Jerry Brown in 1992 and Gary Bauer in
2000 all were successful appealing to small donors.
Ronald Reagan also relied heavily on small donors in all
three of his presidential campaigns. What was unusual
for 2004 was that after Howard Dean dropped out of
the race, both major party candidates shifted their own
fundraising efforts toward small donors. By the end of
the campaign, John Kerry had raised 37 percent of his
total contributions from donors who gave $200 or less
and President Bush had raised 31 percent. In contrast,
in the 2000 election, Al Gore raised 20 percent and
2
John Mintz, “McCain Camp Enjoys a Big Net Advantage,” The
Washington Post, 9 February 2000. More generally on McCain’s
Internet-based fundraising in 2000, see Steve Davis, Larry Elin,
and Grant Reeher, Click on Democracy: The Internet’s Power to
Change Political Apathy into Civic Action (Boulder, Colo.: Westview
Press, 2002).
SMALL DONORS AND ONLINE GIVING
| INTRODUCTION | PAGE 3
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Figure 1
Percentage of 2004
presidential campaign
contributions in
amounts less than $200
George W.
Bush
Total
contributions
from
individuals
$256m
31%
John Kerry
$215m
37%
Howard
Dean
$51m
60%
John
Edwards
$22m
14%
Wesley
Clark
$17m
31%
Richard
Gephardt
$14m
13%
Joe
Lieberman
$14m
9%
Dennis
Kucinich
70%
Bob
Graham
$4m
9%
Carol
Mosley
Braun
$532k
24%
Al
Sharpton
$8m
$496k
13%
SOURCE: CAMPAIGN FINANCE INSTITUTE
Figure 2
Percentage of individual
contributions to presidential
nominees in amounts less than $200
31%
16%
37%
3
Michael J. Malbin, “A Public Funding System in Jeopardy: Lessons
from the Presidential Nomination Contest of 2004,” Election Law Journal 5, no. 1 (2006). Percentages are the proportion of total contributions from individuals (excluding money from self-financing, parties,
PACs or federal funding).
4
Paula Dwyer et al., The Amazing Money Machine: Defying Doomsayers,
the Dems - by Some Measures - Are Outraising the Republicans [Online
magazine] (Business Week online, 2 August 2004 [cited 7 February
2006]); available from www.businessweek.com, Malbin, “A Public
Funding System in Jeopardy: Lessons from the Presidential Nomination Contest of 2004.”
5
Campaign Finance Institute Task Force on Financing Presidential
Nominations, “So the Voters May Choose: Reviving the Presidential
Matching Fund System,” (Washington, D.C.: Campaign Finance Institute, 2005).
20%
2000
2004
NOTE: Percentages are the proportion of individual contributions.
SOURCE: CAMPAIGN FINANCE INSTITUTE
PAGE 4
George Bush 16 percent from small donors.3
The Kerry campaign was ultimately able to raise
enough money to compete with President Bush, who is a
formidable fundraiser. Bush raised $96 million in 2000 and
was widely expected before the campaign to raise $150 to
$200 million in 2004 – an estimate he easily surpassed.
The Bush campaign raised $257 million in contributions
from individuals and $270 million in all. Nonetheless, the
Kerry campaign was largely able to close the funding gap.
Kerry raised $216 million in contributions from individuals
and $235 million in all. Kerry was also able to raise about a
third of his contributions online, whereas Bush raised much
less online.4 This was due to Kerry’s need to raise money
later in the campaign and to the fundraising strategies of
both campaigns.
While there was a surge of giving from small donors in
2004, much of that money was raised late in the campaign.
Most of the early money came from large donors, and
early money is critical. It buys advertising, enhances
the perception of viability and attracts more money and
support. The press sees early fundraising success as an
indicator of a winning campaign. In 2003, a year before
the election and months before the Democratic nominee
was determined, contributions of $1,000 or more made
up 66 percent of the individual contributions to the major
candidates.5 The percentage of contributions from donors
who gave $200 or less steadily increased through the
summer of 2004, peaking in May for President Bush (when
65 percent of his contributions came from those who gave
$200 or less) and June for John Kerry (47 percent). By the
end of the campaign, Kerry had raised $80 million and
Bush $79 million in individual contributions of less than
$200. Except for Bush’s $96 million total in 2000, this
was more than any candidate had ever raised in total for
any previous primary campaign. However, the great bulk
of small donations to both leading candidates ($72 million
of Kerry’s and $52 million of Bush’s) were made after Kerry
had wrapped up the Democratic nomination March 2. The
campaigns of Howard Dean and Dennis Kucinich were
exceptional because each raised more than half of their
early money from small donors, and for Dean’s campaign
the amount was substantial. Nonetheless, large donors
generally dominated the early campaign in 2004.
A huge amount of soft money was removed from the
election with the advent of BCRA, and this money was
primarily from very large donors. Some no doubt ended up
| INTRODUCTION | INSTITUTE FOR POLITICS, DEMOCRACY & THE INTERNET
www.IPDI.org
with the newly energized 527 organizations, such as
America Coming Together, the Media Fund, Progress
for America, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and Moveon.
org. But most of these organizations were funded by
a relatively small number of donors, and the money
they collected in 2004 for federal campaigning did
not match the amount of soft money in 2000. By one
estimate, even taking into account all the additional
money contributed to 527s, more than $300 million in
soft money contributed in the 2000 campaign did not
reappear in 2004.6
Large donors extend their influence by bundling, or
the practice of one person soliciting donations from
others, usually friends and acquaintances. Bundling
surged in 2000 (especially with the Bush campaign)
and continued apace in 2004. The practice makes
the campaign indebted to individuals who each may
be responsible for hundreds of thousands of dollars
in campaign funds. President Bush raised at least $76
million, or 26 percent of his primary campaign budget,
from 327 “Pioneers” who raised at least $100,000 and
221 “Rangers” who raised at least $200,000. John
Kerry raised at least $42 million, or nearly 17 percent of
his primary campaign budget, from 226 “Vice Chairs”
who raised at least $100,000 and 298 “Co-Chairs”
who raised at least $50,000.7
The number of people who gave $200 or more to
presidential campaigns (and hence are itemized on
reports to the FEC) has grown steadily over the last
20 years, but it remains only a tiny minority of adults.
Contributing money to politics is a form of political
participation undertaken by precious few Americans.
According to the Campaign Finance Institute, there
were only 223,000 discrete donors who gave $200 or
more to a major party presidential candidate in 2000
and 475,000 such donors in 2004. This means that
presidential donors of $200 or more amounted to only
one-tenth of one percent of the adult population in
2000 and two-tenths of one percent in 2004.8
But the dramatic growth story for 2004 came in the
number of small donors. We know less about the number
of small donors than about large donors because the
campaigns and parties are not required to release that
data. However, we do have enough information to make
reasonable estimates. We know that in 2000, when
data from all candidates were available, that there were
625,000 donors who gave less than $200 and that
these donors gave the candidates an average of $60
6
Steve Weissman and Ruth Hassan, “BCRA and the 527 Groups,”
in The Election after Reform: Money, Politics and the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, ed. Michael J. Malbin (Lanham, Md.: Rowman &
Littlefield, 2006 (forthcoming)).
7
Public Citizen, “The Importance of Bundlers to the Bush & Kerry
Campaigns: Post-Election Summary of Findings,” (Washington,
D.C.: Public Citizen, 2004).
8
These estimates vary from other public estimates which may
count some donors more than once, calculate number of donations rather than number of donors, include small donors of $200
or less, or include contributions to the parties along with the direct contributions to candidates being counted here.
each. In the 2004 presidential campaign contributions
of less than $200 accounted for $206 million. If we
assume that the average under-$200 donor gave
$75 in 2004, a bit more than in 2000, that would
mean there were about 2.8 million small donors. If the
average donor gave as much as $100 that would still
suggest there were more than two million such donors.
Either way, it marks a huge increase over 2000 – at
least a tripling and maybe more than a quadrupling in
the number of small donors. Combining the small with
the large donors would mean that somewhere between
1.1 and 1.5 percent of the adult population gave to a
presidential candidate in 2004, compared to about 0.4
percent of the adult population in 2000. As in 2000,
although the vast majority of the donors were small
donors, the bulk of the money came from large donors.
Both numbers grew, but the more dramatic growth in
participation came from the pool of small donors.9
The amount of money raised in the 2004 election
broke nearly every record. The presidential campaigns
raised more than $600 million in donations and the
national political parties raised another $1.2 billion, all
of it in hard money. (Soft money contributions were
banned under BCRA.) On top of that was $1.2 billion
raised by House and Senate candidates and another
$400 million raised and spent through federally active
“527” organizations.10
So why did more people give in 2004 than ever
before? Any consideration of the 2004 presidential
election has to begin with the partisan divide in the
electorate, the acrimony of the presidential campaigns
and the polarized attitudes toward President Bush,
especially framed in terms of the War in Iraq and
national security. It was an extraordinary campaign
in this respect. We certainly found some donors
motivated by a dislike for John Kerry, but the hostility
was more prevalent among those opposed to President
Bush. This anger helps explain how the Democratic
National Committee and John Kerry were essentially
able to close the funding gap that has historically
existed between the parties. Coupled with this was the
greater availability of Internet access and information
online that made it possible for donors to seek out
candidate Web sites at their convenience. It was easier
for motivated donors to give. In addition, the campaigns
9
For 2000 data, Campaign Finance Institute Task Force on Financing Presidential Nominations, “Participation, Competition, Engagement: Reviving and Improving Public Funding for Presidential
Nomination Politics,” (Washington, D.C.: Campaign Finance Institute, 2003). For 2004 data, Michael J. Malbin, “A Public Funding
System in Jeopardy: Lessons from the Presidential Nomination
Contest of 2004,” in The Election after Reform: Money, Politics and
the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, ed. Michael J. Malbin (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, (forthcoming)).
10
Federal Election Commission, 2004 Presidential Campaign Financial Activity Summarized [Online report] (3 February 2005
[cited 7 November 2005]); available from www.fec.gov/press/
press2004, Federal Election Commission, Congressional Candidates Spend $1.16 Billion During 2003-2004 [Online report] (Federal Election Commission, 9 June 2005 [cited 6 February 2006]);
available from www.fec.gov/press/press2005, Weissman and
Hassan, “BCRA and the 527 Groups.”
SMALL DONORS AND ONLINE GIVING
| INTRODUCTION | PAGE 5
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How many people
contribute to
political parties or
candidates?
We know how many people gave $200 or
more to federal campaigns, but not how many
gave less than that. Campaigns are not required
to report that information.
Public opinion surveys regularly ask whether
someone contributed money to a political
candidate or party, but the data are hard to
interpret because of differences in question
wording and because people often exaggerate
their reports of political participation. Giving
money to parties or candidates is almost
certainly “overreported” by survey respondents,
but it is unclear by how much.
About 12 percent of adult Americans
responding to the National Election Studies
survey said they made a campaign contribution
to a candidate or party (at the federal, state or
local level) in 2004. The Pew Research Center
for the People and the Press estimated 15
percent of adults donated money “in support
of candidates” in the 2004 election, although
respondents may view donations to many
different groups to be “in support of candidates.”
A George Washington University Battleground
poll conducted in October 2005, almost a year
after the election, found that 28 percent said
they had given money to a candidate or party.1
These estimates are almost certainly high.
Ten percent of the adult population is more than
20 million donors. We suspect that a closer
estimate would be between five and 10 percent
of adults gave money to a federal candidate or
campaign (but not necessarily the presidential
campaign) in 2004.
1
National Election Studies, The NES Guide to Public Opinion
and Electoral Behavior [Web site] (University of Michigan,
Center for Political Studies, 1995-2000 [cited 26 September 2005]); available from www.umich.edu/~nes/
nesguide/nesguide.htm. Pew Research Center for the
People and the Press, Voters Liked Campaign 2004, but Too
Much ‘Mud-Slinging’ [Online report] (The Pew Research
Center for the People and the Press, 11 November 2004
2004 [cited 20 October 2005]); available from peoplepress.org/reports/. George Washington University Battleground Poll, GWU Battleground 2005 (XXVIII) [Online
report] (25 October 2005 [cited 15 December 2005]);
available from www.tarrance.com/battleground.html.
PAGE 6
actively promoted online giving. Online fundraising was
cheaper for the campaigns and the new phenomenon
attracted media coverage. Finally, professional political
fundraisers have continued to hone sophisticated tactics
such as micro-targeting and immediate online response.
Defining “small donors” and why they are
important
The term “small donors” means different things to
different people, and this has only confused the discussion
surrounding them. In the context of the presidential
campaign “small donors” most often identifies those
people who gave less than $200 to a single candidate.
When donors give $200 or more campaigns are required
to report their names and other personal information to the
FEC, so data on these donors are publicly available.11 The
$200 cutoff is a distinction made by Congress in an effort
to define some reasonable threshold for disclosure, but it
is not based on a belief that someone who gives slightly
more than $200 thinks differently than someone who
gives slightly less. Campaign representatives, in contrast,
often talk about “small donors” as anyone who gives less
than $1,000 or $2,000. Some fundraising professionals
define small donors as those who give small amounts in
each contribution, even if the contributions add up to a
large total. Party fundraisers, who can collect $25,000
from a donor, talk about $2,000 donors as “small.” This
was especially true before BCRA. When soft money was
unlimited it seemed that anyone giving “only” $1,000 was
a small donor. Political journalists appear to identify donors
by how the donors define themselves, so one news story
might describe a small donor as someone who gave $1,000
and in another story it’s someone who gave $25.12 The
amount of money that defines a “small donor” depends on
whom you ask.
What is consistent, however, is the view that small
donors are good for the political process. On one side
are arguments made about the supposedly corrupting
influence of large contributions. On the other side are
a set of affirmative arguments about the importance of
civic engagement. Getting more people to give even a
little money is seen as healthy for the political process.
More small donors indicate a broad and active electorate.
Donations tie donors to the campaign, giving them a
stake in the process and increasing the likelihood of their
participating in other ways. Our survey probes these
affirmative arguments with questions about other forms of
participation by small donors and Internet donors.
11
Some data on donors who gave less than $200 are available from a
few campaigns that choose to report this information to the FEC and
campaigns seeking matching funds during the presidential primaries.
12
See, for example, Paul Farhi, “Small Donors Become Big Political Force:
Both Major Political Parties See Surge in Contributors,” The Washington
Post, 3 May 2004, Charles Pope, “Campaign 2004: Small Donors Beef
up Political Coffers,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 22 October 2004.
| INTRODUCTION | INSTITUTE FOR POLITICS, DEMOCRACY & THE INTERNET
www.IPDI.org
METHODOLOGY
The goal of this project was to study people who gave
small donations to the presidential primary candidates
in the 2004 election and, in particular, people who
gave online or who gave for the first time. Like all social
research, what we know about our subject – political
donors – is shaped by the available data. In this case,
campaign finance law has greatly influenced how we
study political donors and what we know about them.
The Federal Election Commission (FEC) monitors
campaign financing and enforces campaign finance
laws. Federal candidates must collect the names and
addresses of anyone who contributes $50 or more
and must report to the FEC the names and personal
information of anyone who donates $200 or more to
a federal candidate during an election (either a primary
or general election).1 The FEC makes that information
public on its Web site (www.fec.gov). Computerized
databases and the Internet have made this information
much more easily accessible, and FEC reports have
become a staple of political news coverage. Researchers
can obtain the names and addresses of these publicly
reported donors (anyone who gave $200 or more) and
attempt to contact them for study. Most prior donor
research is therefore about these donors.
The Small Donors Project obtained its list of donors
who gave $200 or more from the Campaign Finance
Institute (CFI), which was a partner in this project. CFI
cleaned and sorted the FEC data and maintains its own
database of donors to federal campaigns. This list was
a random sample of everyone who gave $200 or more
to a presidential candidate anytime during the 2004
campaign.
We know less about other groups of political donors
because it is more difficult to identify and contact
them. For example, we know less about donors to state
campaigns because so many of these elections take
place. Surveying each of the states every two years
would be a daunting task. Likewise, we know little about
the donors to the “527” advocacy organizations that
played such a visible role in the 2004 campaign. And
unfortunately, past survey research has had little to say
about people who gave less than $200 to presidential
1
State campaigns are, of course, monitored by the states themselves.
campaigns, and who comprise the vast majority of
presidential donors.
Most federal candidates do not give to the FEC
the names of donors who contribute less than $200,
although they certainly could. However, presidential
candidates who wish to obtain matching campaign
funds from the government are required to submit the
same information about any contribution they wish to
have matched, including small donors. The government
will match up to the first $250 of each contribution,
and the total government funding is, of course, capped.
To receive these matching funds in 2004, candidates
must have agreed to limit their spending to about $50
million in the primaries and $75 million in the general
election.
Six Democratic candidates and independent
candidate Ralph Nader filed for matching funds and
provided to the FEC some names of donors, most of
whom gave less than $200.2 President George W.
Bush, John Kerry, Howard Dean and Carol Moseley
Braun did not ask for matching funds. For Bush, Kerry
and Dean, this was because they did not wish to be
bound by the spending limits. This wholesale rejection
of public funding by the major candidates follows upon
George W. Bush’s rejection in 2000, which in turn was
partly a reaction to Steve Forbes’s decision to do so
in 1996.3 Moseley Braun did not raise enough money
to qualify. The Rev. Al Sharpton submitted names but
was eventually denied eligibility for matching funds.
It is from the lists of matching funds donors that we
drew part of our sample of small donors. Many of
these matching funds donors gave to more than one
candidate. For example, early small donors to John
Edwards often went on to contribute additional money
to John Kerry. This list of names from the matching
fund files, therefore, includes people who were not
only donors to these seven candidates. It is, however,
primarily a Democratic list.
2
Lyndon H. LaRouche also received $1.4 million in matching
funds.
3
John C. Green and Nathan S. Bigelow, “The 2000 Presidential
Nominations: The Costs of Innovation,” in Financing the 2000 Election, ed. David B. Magleby (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2001), Malbin, “A Public Funding System in Jeopardy:
Lessons from the Presidential Nomination Contest of 2004.”
SMALL DONORS AND ONLINE GIVING
| METHODOLOGY | PAGE 7
www.IPDI.org
To get beyond the matching fund files, we
approached representatives from the Dean, Kerry and
Bush campaigns immediately after the election and
requested some names of small donors to survey for
this project. We received encouraging responses from
two campaigns, and a firm commitment from one
campaign to participate. Unfortunately, after several
months of negotiations all three campaigns eventually
refused to provide even a limited sample of names of
their small donors.
However, during the 2004 campaign the Bush/
Cheney re-election Web site posted the names of all
its campaign donors as part of an effort to offer greater
transparency to the campaign. The campaign also did
the same thing in the 2000 election.4 The effort was
both praised for its openness and criticized as a ploy
to emphasize small donor support and play up the
grassroots aspects of the campaign. The information
was posted online in such a way that the total dataset
could not be downloaded or analyzed, so it was of little
immediate use to journalists or researchers. It was not
possible to sort the information easily, although a few
media outlets tried.5 This online feature was available
throughout the campaign and removed immediately
after the election. The Kerry and Dean campaigns
made no similar effort. Despite the unwieldy nature
of the Bush Web site data, researchers at the Ray C.
Bliss Institute for Applied Politics at the University of
Akron downloaded lists of small donors from the Bush
campaign and made available to the Small Donors
Project about 1,200 names.
Our sample therefore consists of (1) a random
sample of all presidential donors who gave $200
or more and (2) samples randomly drawn from the
seven campaigns that applied for matching funds (six
Democratic candidates and Ralph Nader) supplemented
with a sample of small donors from the Bush/Cheney
Web site. This sample of donors is disproportionately
Democratic because more names were available to
sample. While thousands of names of Democratic
small donors were available from the FEC, fewer names
of Republican donors were available from the list culled
from the Bush/Cheney Web site. We try to take this
into account in our analysis by looking carefully for the
effects of partisanship in the results. In addition, the
name of each small donor was later checked with the
FEC database to try to make certain the donor did not
give enough to another candidate to become a large
donor. (For example, someone might have given $25
4
Lindsey Arent, Bush Peels Back the Curtain [Online magazine]
(Wired News, 10 September 1999 [cited 2 November 2005]);
available from www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,21695,00.
html, Reuters, Bush’s Campaign Donor List Gets Mixed Response
[Online magazine] (CNET News.com, 10 September 1999 [cited
2 November 2005]); available from news.com.com/2100-1023204335.html.
5
David Knox, Blue-Collar Donors? Not in This Election Cycle: Uncovering Who Really Gives in the 2000 Race for the Presidency [Online
article] (Investigative Reporters and Editors, Inc., Summer 2000
[cited 5 November 2005]); available from www.campaignfinance.org/tracker/summer00/knox.html.
PAGE 8
to Edwards early in the campaign, but later gave $500
to John Kerry.) This sample of small donors, while not
strictly representative, is reflective of the donor pool
in general. It also includes a large number of donors to
the John Kerry and Howard Dean campaigns. This is
because many donors made contributions to multiple
candidates. So although the Kerry campaign did not
provide a list of small donors, 39 percent of the small
donors we surveyed made a donation to Kerry.
The Small Donors Survey was conducted by mail
and online from July 1 to November 30, 2005. About
5,860 people were sampled. The response rate after
bad addresses were removed was 27 percent, or 1,581
completed surveys. Of those, 935 were from our lists of
small donors and 646 were from the FEC lists of donors
who gave $200 or more. (A more detailed description
of the methodology is in Appendix A.)
The focus of this report is on several groups that we
know little about – small donors, first-time donors and
online donors, who are really appearing for the first time
as a major factor in a presidential election. We generally
try to confine our analysis to these groups. We are less
interested in partisan differences, for example, or in
aspects about large donors in general. Nonetheless,
as we shall see, partisan differences were important in
several analyses, and we note these differences when
they arise. But for the most part, we focus on small,
first-time and online donors. While we mention some
overall tendencies apparent in our sample of large
donors, such as the increase in the number of female
donors, stronger support of these observations awaits
further research.
Of course, the small donor cutoff of $200 is an
arbitrary one, established only by FEC guidelines.
There is no evidence that $150 donors are different
from $250 donors (other than the $100). We do not
know that they have different motives to donate. On
the other hand, we are confident that people who give
the maximum contribution of $2,000 differ in many
ways from donors who give much less. We do not
accept the $200 cutoff as anything other than a line
chosen largely for convenience. It seems to us that the
person who gives $50 to a candidate five times would
have more in common with someone who gives $25
five times than with a person who wrote a single check
for $500. Nonetheless, we adopt the arbitrary cutoff of
$200 for some of our analyses mostly because of the
way the data are organized, and they are organized that
way because of the law.
It is important to keep in mind that we sampled
presidential donors. Donors also contributed to local
and state campaigns, which collected $1.8 billion in
the 2004 election cycle.6 They contributed to political
action committees (PACs), individual congressional
campaigns and congressional committees, such as
the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee,
6
Institute on Money in State Politics, “State Elections Overview
2004,” (Helena, MT: Institute on Money in State Politics, 2005).
| METHODOLOGY | INSTITUTE FOR POLITICS, DEMOCRACY & THE INTERNET
www.IPDI.org
the National Republican Congressional Committee
and their counterparts for the senate. There is a lot of
crossover giving – people who give to a presidential
race also give in state and local races – but our focus
for this survey is presidential donors.
Using data supplied by the FEC we determined
whether a donor gave a total of $100 or less, $101 to
$499, or $500 or more in the 2004 election cycle
(which includes donations in 2003 and 2004). We
determined the $100 and $500 cutoffs because they
have been used in past research and because they
seem to be logical points at which someone could be
clearly considered a “small donor” or “large donor.” The
donors who gave $101 to $499 are often removed from
the tables for convenience and clarity.
Obviously, not everyone will agree on these dividing
lines. We also note that some fundraisers prefer the
breakdown by average donation, rather than the total
of donations. The logic is that someone who gives $50
many times is still a small donor, even if the total of
donations adds up to hundreds of dollars. This person
would be a highly motivated small donor, not a large
donor. Fundraisers argue that this person typically
must be asked for money as if he or she were a small
donor, usually by direct mail, and for fundraisers, the
“ask” is everything. Large donors must be asked for
money differently. The waters become even murkier if
we consider those who commit to making a donation of
$500, and then do so with 10 monthly installments of
$50. What to call them?
Despite these complications, we believe our cutoffs
make sense and capture important differences. We
also found that in most cases the pool of donors who
gave a total of $100 and the pool of donors who gave
an average of $50 looked pretty similar. Most donors
whose total contributions were less than $200 gave
only once, so their average and total would be the
same.
We strive throughout our analysis to look closely at
differences by characteristics such as partisanship, and
in several places analyze data in other ways. Finally, we
only highlight differences between subgroups when
those differences are statistically significant.
SMALL DONORS AND ONLINE GIVING
| METHODOLOGY | PAGE 9
www.IPDI.org
PAGE 10
| SMALL AND LARGE DONORS | INSTITUTE FOR POLITICS, DEMOCRACY & THE INTERNET
www.IPDI.org
SMALL AND LARGE DONORS
The first portion of this section describes the
demographics — gender, age, education and household
income — for donors who gave $200 or more. We
do this in order to compare the 2004 donors with
past surveys and to get a better sense of the donor
pool in general. As we shall see, donors are from an
elite socioeconomic group. After that we turn to just
the 2004 data gathered for this report and begin to
compare small donors (those who gave $100 or less)
with large donors (those who gave $500 or more).
Donors who Gave $200 or More
Gender
Most surveys show that political donors are
disproportionately male. But even in estimating
something as simple as gender we must keep in mind
that donor lists are inaccurate, sometimes deliberately
so. It is common knowledge that some big donors
expand their contributions by having spouses or
children make contributions. In addition, our interviews
with donors found that many couples donate money as
a single unit. The donor may be designated as the male
head of the household because he wrote the check,
but the donation is really a “couple” or “household”
donation. In a few cases donors told us they gave
money to a candidate who may not have had their
spouse or partner’s support, but larger donations were
usually made by joint consent. There are political mixed
marriages, but it is much more likely that a couple will
agree on political choices when it comes to giving
money.
With these caveats in mind, research going back
20 years has almost always found large donors to be
disproportionately male. In 1996 and 2000 presidential
donor surveys showed that 70 percent of large donors
($200 or more) were male.1 This may be changing.
We found evidence that the gender gap was smaller
in 2004 than in prior elections. Our data suggest that
among donors who gave $200 or more the proportion
who are women has increased. We also find some
support for this finding from an analysis of the names
of donors collected by the FEC. This study found that
female donors (or at least people who have female
sounding names) increased from 30 percent in 2000
to 36 percent in 2004.2 In our survey, the proportion of
females among the $200-or-more donors was an even
higher 42 percent.
Age
Media images of political campaigns often focus
on younger supporters, and that was especially true
in 2004. Howard Dean’s campaign received extensive
media coverage early in the primaries and its image
was one of youth. Dean’s emphasis on the Internet only
exaggerated this image because online activists tend to
be younger.3 There were also enormous well-publicized
efforts to engage young voters, especially through the
Internet. The New Voters Project and a coalition of
youth voting groups such as Rock the Vote registered
1
Information about past donors is taken from Clifford W. Brown,
Jr., Lynda W. Powell, and Clyde Wilcox, Serious Money: Fundraising
and Contributing in Presidential Nomination Campaigns (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1995), Peter L. Francia et al., “Individual Donors in the 1996 Federal Elections,” in Financing the 1996
Election, ed. John C. Green (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1999), Clyde
Wilcox, Jr. Clifford W. Brown, and Lynda W. Powell, “Sex and
the Political Contributor: The Gender Gap among Contributors
to Presidential Candidates in 1988,” Political Research Quarterly
46, no. 2 (1993), Clyde Wilcox et al., “With Limits Raised, Who
Will Give More? The Impact of BCRA on Individual Donors,” in
Life after Reform: When the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act Meets
Politics, ed. Michael J. Malbin (Lanham, Md: Rowman & Littlefield,
2003).
2
The analysis of donors who gave $200 or more was conducted by
the Center for Responsive Politics (www.opensecrets.org) of the
donor names that could be identified as male or female. About 93
percent of donor names can usually be so identified. The remaining names could not be identified or the donor did not give a full
first name. In 1992 72 percent were male, in 1996 69 percent were
male and in 2000 70 percent were male.
3
Joseph Graf and Carol Darr, “Political Influentials Online in the
2004 Presidential Campaign,” (Washington, D.C.: Institute for
Politics, Democracy & the Internet, The George Washington University, 2004).
SMALL DONORS AND ONLINE GIVING
| SMALL AND LARGE DONORS | PAGE 11
“
www.IPDI.org
We give as a unit. We’re a team.
We discuss it back and forth, and
I can’t tell you of any decisions
that we shelved because we
didn’t agree on it, because we
tend to agree. … I don’t give to
conservative causes and my wife
gives to liberal causes. We have
friends that I think probably do
that, but I don’t know how they
”
can exist under the same roof.
They must never talk politics.
— a 61-year-old George Bush
donor from Michigan
Table 1
Demographic profile of presidential
donors who gave $200 or more,
1996-2004
millions of young voters.4
But the truth is that young people are still less likely
to participate in politics. They are significantly less likely
than everyone else to vote. While the percentage of adults
aged 18 to 24 who voted rose from 36 percent in 2000 to
42 percent in 2004, 64 percent of all eligible voters voted
in 2004.5 And young people are less likely to give money
to candidates. Political donors have tended to be older
than average, and 2004 was no exception. More than 60
percent of all 2004 donors were over 50, and that was true
in 1996 and 2000 as well. Just 2 percent of donors who
gave $200 or more in 2004 were under 35.
Income
Not surprisingly, donors who gave at least $200 have
much more household income than average Americans,
and in the past eight years the donor pool has become
even wealthier. In 1996 about a quarter of these donors
claimed more than $250,000 for their yearly household
income. That proportion grew to 44 percent in 2000 and
35 percent in 2004. Fewer than two percent of all American
households in 2004 earned that much.6
Education
Education is a great dividing line between donors and
non-donors. (Likewise, it is a great dividing line between
voters and non-voters.) Donors who gave $200 or more
are very highly educated, and this finding is consistent over
the past 20 years. The least educated Americans are hardly
represented at all in the donor pool. Only about 3 percent
of the donors we surveyed have no more than a high school
diploma, and nearly all of them gave less than $100. There
are so few donors with just a high school education that
many prior researchers don’t even bother to consider them.
Almost half of adult Americans (45 percent) stopped their
formal education with a high school diploma, but they are
largely invisible in the donor pool.7
1996
2000
2004
Small and Large Donors Compared
Male
Female
72 %
28 %
70 %
30 %
58 %
42 %
18 to 34
35 to 50
51 to 65
Over 65
Household Income
Less than $100,000
$100,000 to $249,000
$250,000 to $500,000
More than $500,000
Education
Less than college degree
College degree
Some graduate school
Graduate school
n
7%
30 %
25 %
37 %
2%
29 %
41 %
28 %
2%
29 %
46 %
23 %
Gender
We now turn to comparing small and large donors,
which is the focus of our report. Here we compare three
groups: donors who gave $100 or less (small donors),
donors who gave $101 to $499, and donors who gave $500
43 %
32 %
24 %
14 %
42 %
21 %
23 %
22 %
43 %
20 %
15 %
19 %
23 %
12 %
48 %
1,119
9%
21 %
10 %
60 %
646
Gender
Age
NA
27 %
23 %
NA
50 %
1,094
NOTE: 1996 data from Francia et al (1999). 2000 data from
Wilcox et al (2003). 2004 data from the Small Donors Project.
PAGE 12
4
i.e. www.newvotersproject.org, www.rockthevote.com, www.youthvote.org
5
U.S. Census Bureau, Table 1. Reported Rates of Voting and Registration
for the Population 18 Years and over, by Selected Characteristics: November 2004. (U.S. Census Bureau, 26 May 2005 [cited 16 September
2005]); available from www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/CB05-73Table1.xls.
6
U.S. Census Bureau, Table Hinc-06. Income Distribution to $250,000
or More for Households: 2004 (U.S. Census Bureau, 24 June 2005
[cited 16 September 2005]); available from pubdb3.census.gov/macro/032005/hhinc/new06_000.htm.
7
U.S. Census Bureau, Table 2. Educational Attainment of the Population
15 Years and over, by Single Years of Age, Sex, Race, and Hispanic Origin:
2004. (U.S. Census Bureau, 28 March 2005 [cited 16 September
2005]); available from www.census.gov/population/socdemo/education/cps2004/tab02-01.xls.
| SMALL AND LARGE DONORS | INSTITUTE FOR POLITICS, DEMOCRACY & THE INTERNET
www.IPDI.org
FROM THE RESEARCH:
or more (large donors). As we will see, while small donors
differ from large donors, small donors remain firmly part of
the upper and upper middle classes in America.
A survey of donors who gave less than $200 in the 2000
election found that 76 percent were male, so they reflected
the gender breakdown of the $200-and-over donors at
that time.8 We saw above that a greater percentage of large
donors in 2004 are women, and it appears that is true among
small donors in 2004 too. Women are evenly distributed
between small and large donors. We are cautious about
this observation because our sample of small donors is not
completely representative of all small donors in 2004, but
it adds support for the observation that more women have
entered the donor pool.
Almost half of adult Americans
(45 percent) stopped their
formal education with the high
school diploma, but they are
largely invisible in the donor pool.
Table 2
Demographic profile of presidential
donors in 2004
Donors
Donors
Donors
who gave who gave who gave
$100 or $101 to $500 or
less
$499
more
Age
As we saw above, political donors are generally middle
aged or older. The median age of those who gave $100 or
less was 59, which makes them older than everyone else.9
But small donors ($100 or less) are more congregated at
both the young end (ages 18 to 34) and the old end (over
65) of the scale. There is a possible explanation for this.
Much of political giving hinges on the ability to give. People
between the ages of 35 and 65 are in their prime earning
years and simply have more money to contribute.
We find no evidence of the age gap widely reported
for donors to the Howard Dean campaign, including
the well-publicized claim that more than a quarter of all
Dean’s donors were under age 30.10 The culture of youth
was a reoccurring theme in the media coverage of the
Dean campaign, particularly early in the campaign,11 but
the money still came from older donors. The median age
of donors who reported that their first campaign donation
was to Howard Dean was 58, as was the median age of
donors who reported that they made any contribution to
Dean.12 Fewer than 5 percent of his donors in our sample
were under age 30. Our sample of Dean’s donors is not
representative (the Dean campaign did not provide a list
8
Alexandra Cooper and Jason Reifler, “Small Fish in a Big Pond: SmallMoney Donors to the 2000 Presidential Campaigns” (paper presented
at the Annual meeting of the Southern Political Science Association,
Savannah, Ga., November 2002).
9
Although this difference appears small, the mean difference is statistically significant at p < .01 using one-way ANOVA.
10
One blog reported that Dean said in early 2004 that one quarter of the
June to September 2003 donors were under age 30 (Arianna Huffington, Unelectable, My Ass! [Web site posting] (7 January 2004 [cited
December 11 2005]); available from www.alternet.org/story/17512.).
The following month in his nomination concession speech he said one
quarter of all his donors were under age 30. This claim then appeared
on several Web sites and in Anya Kamenetz, ‘Deanie Babies’ Grow Up
[Online magazine] (The Nation, 16 March 2004 [cited 30 September
2005]); available from www.thenation.com/doc/20040329.kamenetz. It is repeated in Joe Trippi, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised:
Democracy, the Internet, and the Overthrow of Everything (New York: Regan Books, 2005).
11
See, for example, Kamenetz, ‘Deanie Babies’ Grow Up, Mark Singer,
“Running on Instinct,” The New Yorker, 12 January 2004, Gary Wolf,
“How the Internet Invented Howard Dean,” Wired, January 2004.
12
The number of donors in our sample who said they first gave to Dean
was 190; the number who said they gave to Dean at all was 289. Donors who gave less than $200 were no younger than those who gave
more.
Gender
Male
Female
59 %
41 %
59 %
41 %
59 %
41 %
18 to 34
35 to 50
51 to 65
Over 65
Median Age
Household Income
Less than $25,000
$25,001 to $49,999
$50,000 to $99,999
$100,000 to $249,000
$250,000 to $500,000
More than $500,000
Education
Less than college degree
College degree
Some graduate school
Graduate school
n
8%
20 %
37 %
34 %
59
6%
27 %
42 %
25 %
56
1%
29 %
45 %
24 %
57
8%
21 %
38 %
28 %
4%
1%
3%
5%
33 %
43 %
13 %
3%
1%
3%
16 %
41 %
21 %
19 %
24 %
25 %
12 %
40 %
847
13 %
22 %
10 %
54 %
244
10 %
21 %
10 %
59 %
490
Age
“
SMALL DONORS AND ONLINE GIVING
I think it’s my age. During the
previous two elections, the first
time I was only 18 and I wasn’t
really involved in politics, and
the second time I was a little
more involved, and then this
time I had a full-time job and I
had money to donate.
”
— a 24-year-old Ralph Nader
donor from South Carolina.
| SMALL AND LARGE DONORS | PAGE 13
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Table 3
Percentage who attend church at
least once a week
Donors who Donors who
gave $100 gave $500
or less
or more
50 %
43 %
33 %
13 %
Republicans
Democrats
General
Public
50 %
35 %
NOTE: Information about the general public survey appears in
Appendix A.
Table 4
Percentage who say religion is “very
important” in their lives
Donors who Donors who
gave $100 gave $500
or less
or more
46 %
52 %
26 %
17 %
Republicans
Democrats
General
Public
66 %
55 %
NOTE: Information about the general public survey appears in
Appendix A.
Table 5
Occupations
Retired
Education
Legal
Health
Donors who gave Donors who gave
$100 or less
$500 or more
31 %
21 %
9%
7%
4%
14 %
6%
7%
NOTE: Respondents can name more than one category (i.e.
“retired teacher”)
“
I do think it was more — a
closer, politically-charged
of small donors), but if his donors were so dramatically
younger than those of the other presidential candidates
a greater difference should appear. Dean’s campaign
workers may have been young, but it appears his donors
were not.13
Income
While the donor pool is wealthier than average
Americans, people who gave small contributions are more
likely to look like they come from middle class households.
About 30 percent of these small donors report annual
household income of $50,000 or less, compared to 4
percent of donors who gave $500 or more. The single
most striking difference between large and small donors
is how much money the household earns, and hence how
much money is available for giving. Forty percent of those
who gave $500 or more have a household income of
$250,000 or more. In other demographic traits – such as
age and education – large and small donors appear closer
together. To put the effects of wealth in another way
– wealthy donors almost always gave a lot, comparatively
speaking, whatever their age, gender or occupation. If we
just look at the donors whose households earn more than
$100,000 a year, the average total amount given is more
than $860.
Education
Small donors are less likely to report the level of
education common among large donors, but they are still
highly educated in comparison to the general population.
About 40 percent of under-$100 donors report they
have received a graduate degree, compared to 8 percent
of the general population.14 About 59 percent of donors
who gave an average of $500 or more have received a
graduate degree.
Religious Faith
Religious advocacy groups and religious rhetoric
were prominent during the 2004 presidential campaign,
especially in the re-election efforts of President Bush. The
Bush campaign used a strategy of enlisting clergy and
members of conservative churches, which The New York
Times observed “underscores how heavily Mr. Bush is
relying on conservative Christians.”15 The president often
spoke in religious terms on the campaign trail. Kerry was
more reluctant to talk about religion, although he certainly
did so, especially before black audiences.16 Although there
was some backlash by religious supporters who did not
election — (that prompted me
13
In fact, even Dean’s supporters were no more likely to be younger
than other Democratic activists. See Pew Research Center for the
People and the Press, The Dean Activists: Their Profile and Prospects
[Online report] (6 April 2005 [cited 16 December 2005]); available
from people-press.org/reports.
14
U.S. Census Bureau, Table 2. Educational Attainment of the Population
15 Years and over, by Single Years of Age, Sex, Race, and Hispanic Origin:
2004. ([cited).
15
David D. Kirkpatrick, “Bush Appeal to Churches Seeking Help Raises
Doubts,” The New York Times, 2 July 2004.
16
Jim VandeHei, “Kerry Keeps His Faith in Reserve; Candidate Usually
Talks About Religion before Black Audiences Only,” The Washington
Post, 16 July 2004.
to contribute), but I also think
that when it comes down to it,
I had the money.
”
— a 37-year-old Howard Dean and
John Kerry donor from Oregon.
PAGE 14
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want religion brought into the campaign, Bush drew strong
support from religious voters.17
Despite the importance of religion in the campaign,
political donors were no more religious than the general
public. Donors may even be more secular than non-donors.
In this analysis, we examine Democrats and Republicans
separately because of the clear differences in support the
parties received from religious voters. Large donors ($500
or more) are less likely than members of their own party in
the general public to attend church, and both small ($100
or less) and large donors are less likely to say religion is
“very important” in their lives. These differences appear
among both Democratic and Republican donors. It is not
what we expected for Republican donors when compared
to Republicans generally. The support of religious
conservatives for conservative politicians has been
important, especially in 2000 and 2004, and we expected
that donors would report a greater emphasis on religion in
their lives, but they did not. Both large and small donors are
no more religious than their own partisans in the general
public, and this is true for members of both parties. Donors
are generally more ideologically extreme, as we shall see
below, but they are not more religious.
FROM THE RESEARCH:
Despite the importance of religion in
the campaign, political donors were
no more religious than the general
public.
“
Occupation
Political donors are disproportionately white collar
workers and retired. Most of those who listed an occupation
could be classified as white color workers, rather than
administrative, trade or other workers.18 About 31 percent
of small donors and 21 percent of large donors reported
being retired.
A handful of occupations are disproportionately
represented among political donors, perhaps because so
many aspects of their jobs are dependent on legislative
funding and decision-making. Most notably, these include
educators, health workers and attorneys. Fourteen percent
of all donors who gave $500 or more are attorneys or
otherwise work in the legal profession. Only about 4
percent of people who gave $100 or less are employed in
the legal profession.
I’ve only been old enough
to vote in the last three
presidential elections, so this is
the first year I’ve had a salaried
job, a well paying job. The time
”
before I was in college and time
before that in high school.
— a 30-year-old David Cobb donor
from Alabama. (Cobb was the
Green Party presidential candidate.)
Summary
The donor pool is comprised of a fairly elite
socioeconomic group. Donors are more highly educated,
older and much wealthier than most Americans. Only 2
percent of donors who gave $200 or more in 2004 were
under age 34, and the median age was 57. In most respects,
therefore, the donors who gave $200 or more in 2004 look
much like the major donors in past elections.
The small donors stand somewhere between the large
donors and the general public in many respects. Small
donors were neither as wealthy nor as highly educated
17
Alan Cooperman, “Pastors Issue Directive in Response to Reelection
Tactic,” The Washington Post, 18 August 2004, Pew Research Center
for the People and the Press, Religion and the Presidential Vote — [Online report] (6 December 2004 [cited 14 November 2005]); available
from people-press.org/commentary.
18
It is possible that people in occupations with lower social status may
be less likely to respond to the question.
SMALL DONORS AND ONLINE GIVING
| SMALL AND LARGE DONORS | PAGE 15
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as large donors, although they were more so than the
general population. These findings are consistent with
earlier survey research on the presidential donors of
2000.19 However, the small donors did show a more
bipolar age distribution. They were older, on average,
than large donors, but there were also eight times as
many young people among the small donors as there
were in the top group.
Finally, despite the religious rhetoric in the campaign,
Republican as well as Democratic donors were no more
religious than their own co-partisans and in some cases
less so.
19
PAGE 16
In 2000, 95 percent of the general population and 68 percent
of the donors who gave $200 or less had household incomes of
less than $100,000, compared to 16 percent of those who gave
$200-$999 and 5 percent of the donors who gave the then-maximum amount of $1,000. Small donors were also more likely to
be less than 50 years old than large donors, but older than the
general population, and they were less highly educated than the
large donors, although much more so than the general population. See Wilcox et al., “With Limits Raised, Who Will Give More?
The Impact of BCRA on Individual Donors.” Data is reported in
Campaign Finance Institute Task Force on Financing Presidential
Nominations, “Participation, Competition, Engagement: Reviving
and Improving Public Funding for Presidential Nomination Politics,” p. 106.
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THE DYNAMICS OF
POLITICAL GIVING:
ONLINE AND OFFLINE
We now move to an analysis of political giving.
First we look at how people contributed money, if they
contributed in the past, and whether they intend to
in the future. Then we look more closely at why they
contributed. Throughout this section we compare
the differences between small donors ($100 or less)
and large donors ($500 or more). We also examine
the differences between those who used the Internet
to make some of their political contributions (online
donors) and those who did not (offline donors).
In addition to the surge of small donations in the
2004 campaign was a surge of donations online.
Donors could use a credit or debit card to make
contributions through a Web site, and campaigns
could cut processing and reporting costs and get
immediate access to the donation. Collecting small
online contributions has become so easy and efficient
that campaigns have greater incentives to pursue small
donations. Thus these two important developments in
American politics in 2004 – small donors and online
giving – are closely related.
the influence of the Howard Dean supporters who
migrated to the Kerry campaign after Dean dropped
out. Dean’s supporters and even supporters of Wesley
Clark and Dennis Kucinich showed a propensity to
organize and donate online. The Kerry campaign also
emphasized online donations in the spring of 2004.
The Bush campaign simply had less incentive to push
online contributions later in the campaign because it
was sitting on a larger bank account for the stretch run
to November. The onus to raise money was on Kerry.
Online donors tended to be younger than other
donors (reflecting the tendency of young people to
quickly adopt Internet innovations). In fact, people aged
18 to 34 rarely gave offline. More than 80 percent of 18to 34-year-olds used a credit or debit card through a
Web site, rather than writing a check, for at least one
of their donations. Of those aged 35 to 50, 67 percent
made at least one donation online. Only about a quarter
of those 65 or older gave online. Again, Democrats in
all age groups were more likely to give money online.
The Dynamics of Giving
Online and Offline Donors Compared
Online contributions will be critical for the future
of political fundraising. Far more donors gave online in
2004 than in 2000, when just a fraction of donors gave
online, and online giving is particularly attractive to
young donors.1 In 2004, more than half the Democratic
donors and a quarter of the Republican donors made
at least one of their donations online. There was no
difference in the rate of online giving between small
donors ($100 or less) and large donors ($500 or
more) – contrary to a widely held assumption that large
donors did not give online. But more important than
the size of the donation was party – the Democrats
were more successful funneling their donations to the
Internet than were Republicans. This is in part due to
1
Surveys conducted by Gallup and the Pew Research Center for
the People and the Press during the 2000 campaign found between 1 and 5 percent of people who went online for political information also made a donation online. See Pew Research Center
for the People and the Press, Internet Election News Audience Seeks
Convenience, Familiar Names [Online report] (3 December 2000
[cited 12 January 2006]); available from www.people-press.org/
reports.
Campaign contact: Asking for Contributions
Money is given to those who ask, and fundraisers
know that you need to ask often to raise a lot of
money. Many prospects will say no two or three times
before finally becoming a donor. This is not a case of
repeated requests wearing down a prospective donor’s
resistance, but rather of catching the prospective donor
with the right request at the right time. Someone who
throws away a letter unopened one day may open one
the next day, perhaps newly motivated to donate after
watching the news or talking to a colleague at work.
Generally, the more personal the request the more
likely it is to succeed. It’s easier to say no over the phone
than face-to-face, and easiest of all to say no to an
online banner advertisement by simply ignoring it. Not
surprisingly, big donors are more likely to get a phone
call or even a visit from the candidate. They are more
coveted and more likely to have personal connections
with candidates in the first place.
The Internet has made it easier and cheaper to ask
people for money, often in a very engaging way. Contact
can be highly personalized, so a request can be tied to
SMALL DONORS AND ONLINE GIVING
| THE DYNAMICS OF POLITICAL GIVING | PAGE 17
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Table 6
Percentage of donors who gave
online, by party
Republicans
Democrats
Donors who gave
$100 or less
19 %
54 %
Donors who gave
$500 or more
31 %
64 %
Table 7
Percentage of donors who gave
online, by age group
Donors who gave
$100 or less
87 %
65 %
65 %
21 %
18 to 34
35 to 50
51 to 65
Over 65
Donors who gave
$500 or more
67 %
70 %
59 %
32 %
Table 8
Percentage who contributed without
being asked
Online donors
Offline donors
Donors who gave
$100 or less
46 %
24 %
Donors who gave
$500 or more
39 %
29 %
FROM THE RESEARCH:
What is remarkable is that among
young people aged 18 to 34, very few
gave offline. More than 80 percent of
18-to-34-year-olds used a credit or
debit card through a Web site, rather
than writing a check.
PAGE 18
an issue important to the prospective donor. Web sites have
also made it easier to give before being solicited directly by
the campaign. Before the Internet, someone who wished
to make an unsolicited donation had to undertake a longer
process to get information about a campaign and make a
donation, usually by mail. Donors now don’t need to be
nearly so connected to a campaign, but can maintain some
distance and relative (if illusory) anonymity. Unsolicited
giving has always taken place to some degree, but there is
a sense that it increased in the 2000 and 2004 elections.2
Both were campaigns with a great deal of rancor, partisan
bitterness and, consequently, highly motivated donors.
Unsolicited online giving still presupposes a motivated
donor, even if the donor need not be so highly motivated
as those who sought out the campaign before Internet
fundraising. E-mail and online advertising are fairly passive
and serve donors who are looking to give. If direct mail is
akin to fundraisers chasing donors, then the Internet is akin
to donors chasing fundraisers. In our interviews with donors,
many said their first donation was unsolicited and made
after they looked for information about candidates online.
These donors had been involved in campaigns in the past,
had great interest in the 2004 campaign and got involved
early. When there were more than a half dozen Democratic
candidates to choose from, prospective donors would go
online looking for a candidate they could support.3
Small donors ($100 or less) who gave online were the
most likely to say they gave without being asked. About
46 percent said they made the first donation unsolicited,
without getting a phone call, letter or e-mail asking for
money. This reflects the fact that these small donors were
first-time donors, not yet in the campaign database, and
highly motivated. For these people, the Internet is an entry
to the donor pool. People looking to make a contribution
first look online.
Most donors, however, gave a donation as a response
to a request for money, and those requests came in a flood
of postal mail, e-mail and phone calls. Some donors were
annoyed with the campaigns’ persistence – one dubbed
it “interstate stalking” – but respondents’ answers will
only embolden campaigns. Almost 20 percent of large
donors ($500 or more) said they did not make their first
contribution until they had been contacted four or more
times. Thirty to 40 percent of all donors require at least two
contacts before they finally donate.
The growing importance of e-mail and media coverage
about the online campaign overshadowed the explosion of
direct mail fundraising in 2004. The Democratic National
Committee sent more direct mail in the first few months of
2004 than the party sent throughout all of the 1990s – and
more than 60 million pieces of direct mail were sent during
2
For some discussion of unsolicited giving in 2000 see Alexandra Cooper and Michael Munger, “Big Money, Small Money: Characteristics of
Donors in the U.S. Presidential Elections of 2000” (paper presented
at the Annual meeting of the Public Choice Society, Baltimore, Md.,
March 11-14 2004).
3
The previous three paragraphs are informed by Hal Malchow, Personal
interview, 10 February 2006.
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the campaign.4 Postal letters remain the most frequent
means of contact with donors. At least 80 percent of donors
– regardless of how much they gave – received a letter
in the mail from a candidate or campaign. Fewer donors
received e-mail. Postal addresses for registered voters are
publicly available, and voter registration lists are some of
the most important lists direct mailers use. Campaigns
usually cannot get an e-mail address until the donor types
it in, so the amount of e-mail a donor received took off after
they made an online donation. About 80 percent of online
donors – both large donors and small donors – say they got
e-mail appeals asking for more donations.5
For donors who want to keep the campaign at bay – to
donate but not get calls or letters at home – e-mail is the
means to do that. Online giving clearly resonates with
donors, and part of the reason may be because e-mail lets
them deal with the campaign on their own terms. They are
unwilling to be contacted by other means. We talked to
several donors whose reaction to e-mail was unexpected.
They said that because e-mail was easily sorted and did
not take up physical space it was less likely to be ignored,
even though it is so easy to hit the delete button. E-mail
sat for days in a “to-do” queue in their mailbox, but postal
mail quickly piled up on the kitchen counter and got in the
way until someone discarded it unopened. So despite email overload, for some people e-mail was more likely to
– eventually – get their attention.
When we looked at who asked whom to give, large
donors were slightly more likely than small donors to be
asked by the campaigns, but they were a lot more likely
to be asked by friends and family. This reflects the social
circles within which large donors move. For large donors,
friends and colleagues are donors too, and these friends
are willing to solicit money for a campaign. After people
donated, they likely received a request for more money
from the campaign, regardless of how much they gave. This
is pressure that all donors felt, but pressure to contribute
is more effective when it comes from people we know and
respect – friends and family. That social pressure was much
greater for large donors.
Online small donors were more likely to be asked to
donate again than were offline small donors. The Internet
has given small donors increased opportunities to connect
with others. For large donors, the distinction between online
and offline donors had less of an effect. In this way, the
Internet has helped close the gap between small and large
donors by giving small online donors greater opportunities
to connect with others, find political information and
perhaps be exposed to the social pressures to move them
into the repeat donor class.
4
Anthony J. Jr. Corrado, Comments made at The Campaign Finance
Institute Forum, “The Election After Reform: Money & Politics and the
Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act.” 14 January 2005, Linda Feldmann,
“In Politics, the Rise of Small Donors,” The Christian Science Monitor, 28
June 2004, Malchow.
5
At the same time, about 30 percent of donors who never donated
online also got e-mail from campaigns, so clearly the campaigns have
found ways to collect e-mail addresses without contributions.
SMALL DONORS AND ONLINE GIVING
“
I was interested in Wesley Clark
before he announced that he
would run. … As soon as he did,
I went on the Internet and found
the ‘Draft Wesley Clark’ group, a
couple Clark groups that I joined,
and from there they kind of led me
to where I could donate. No one
ever asked me to do it.
”
— a 58-year-old Wesley Clark
donor from Indiana.
Table 9
Percentage contacted by letter,
e-mail, phone, or in person
By letter
By e-mail
By phone
In person
Donors who gave Donors who gave
$100 or less
$500 or more
80 %
90 %
47 %
63 %
32 %
40 %
7%
16 %
NOTE: Respondents could check more than one response.
Table 10
Percentage contacted by e-mail
Online donors
Offline donors
Donors who gave
$100 or less
79 %
23 %
Donors who gave
$500 or more
82 %
40 %
FROM THE RESEARCH:
The Democratic National Committee
sent more direct mail in the first few
months of 2004 than the party sent
throughout all of the 1990s — more
than 60 million pieces of direct mail
were sent during the campaign.
| THE DYNAMICS OF POLITICAL GIVING | PAGE 19
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Did anyone ask you
to contribute to a
candidate or party?
The First Donation
Table 11
Percentage asked by “anyone”
Online donors
Offline donors
Donors who gave
$100 or less
60 %
53 %
Donors who gave
$500 or more
71 %
75 %
Table 12
Percentage asked by a campaign
representative
Online donors
Offline donors
Donors who gave
$100 or less
54 %
49 %
Donors who gave
$500 or more
61 %
56 %
Table 13
Percentage asked by a friend or
colleague
Online donors
Offline donors
Donors who gave
$100 or less
14 %
9%
Donors who gave
$500 or more
37 %
40 %
Table 14
Percentage asked by a family
member
Online donors
Offline donors
“
Donors who gave
$100 or less
4%
1%
Donors who gave
$500 or more
6%
5%
A former colleague asked
me. He was involved in the
campaign and said Clark was
good on the economy.
”
— a 38-year-old Wesley Clark
donor from Massachusetts.
PAGE 20
For obvious reasons, fundraisers are intensely interested
in the moments just before someone donates for the first
time. Something prompts a person finally to say “OK” and
write a check or share their credit card number, moving
from the great majority of people who are non-donors into
the fairly select club of donors. This first donation is rarely
without prompting, either via direct solicitation, some
reference in the media or a personal conversation.
We asked donors to indicate from a list of choices what
might have prompted the first donation. The responses
show the pervasiveness of direct mail and the media, as well
as the social networks of large donors. The most frequently
cited response was a letter from the campaign – 46 percent
of small donors and a third of large donors said that a letter
in the mail was among the things that prompted their first
donation. The next most likely responses were the media
– seeing something on television news or in print media.
Making a donation is often a reaction to something in the
media, and these responses tended to be closely related –
donors who saw something in the newspaper, for example,
were likely to also have seen something on television.
Fewer donors said they gave money because of political
advertising on TV, but advertising was focused almost
exclusively on battleground states, so many people did not
see much.
Large donors were much more likely than small donors
to cite a “personal” reason – saying they were encouraged
to donate by a family member, friend or colleague.
This personal touch is a powerful incentive and it again
reflects the networks of donors within which large donors
circulate.
Finally, about 5 percent of respondents said that a
Meetup event or house party was an incentive for their
first donation. Considering that only a tiny fraction of the
population attended such events, this shows that these
gatherings were a powerful influence on potential donors.
A quarter of all the respondents (24 percent) who attended
a Meetup or house party said it prompted them to make
their first donation. The political use of Meetups was
pioneered by the Dean supporters, so nearly all those who
attended were Democrats (89 percent). Seventy percent
were online donors. Getting a prospective donor to a social
event provides a strong incentive to donate, and that’s true
of both large and small donors.
Online donors were much more likely to report that email prompted the first donation, and much less likely to
cite postal mail. However, e-mail addresses were often
collected at the time of donation, so this suggests donors
don’t remember correctly or that they got involved online
prior to donating. Online donors were also more likely than
offline donors to be motivated by political videos online.
Political videos appeared for the first time in the 2004
election, and some received tremendous exposure. “This
Land,” a political parody video by JibJab Media, was seen by
tens of millions of viewers online with only news coverage
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and word-of-mouth advertising.6 Among small donors
who gave online, 8 percent said an online video helped
prompt a donation, which we consider an impressive
feat for a new medium flying under the radar of the
mass media.
The donor pool does not appear to be as stable
year after year as researchers had previously thought.
Past scholarship assumed there was a pool of regular
large donors that returned each election to form the
foundation of a campaign’s funding. The Small Donors
Survey supports other convincing evidence from the
2004 election that this may not be so. Large donors
are certainly more likely than small donors to give
money in “most” elections, but these differences are
not dramatic. More importantly, there is a fair amount
of “churn” in the donor pool – people move in to and
out of the donor pool, depending on the election. As
we shall see later, first-time donors make up 23 percent
of small donors ($100 or less) and 15 percent of large
donors ($500 or more). But in addition, 39 percent of
large donors, presumably the most committed donors,
say they only give in “some” elections. In other words,
a majority of large donors say they are sometimes nondonors in presidential elections. When we ask about
less prominent elections at the state and local level,
this is even more likely. Even if we just look at very large
donors, whose average donation was $1,000 or more
(154 donors in our sample), just 42 percent said they
give in “most” presidential elections.
Past surveys of presidential donors suggested a
more static pool of donors who return to donate in
nearly every election. However, a recent analysis by
the Campaign Finance Institute of the FEC records of
all presidential contributors in 1996, 2000 and 2004
shows a more fluid population of donors in both 2000
and 2004. Only 31 percent of the donors who gave
the maximum $1,000 contribution to George Bush in
2000 (and 30 percent of his donors of $200 or more)
returned in 2004 to make any donation at all (of more
than the reportable threshold of $200).7 For the other
2000 candidates, the proportion of return donors was
even smaller. To look at the same point from the other
end: A substantial majority of George Bush’s and John
6
7
Are they regular donors?
Carol Darr and Julie Barko, “Under the Radar and over the Top:
Online Political Videos in the 2004 Election,” (Washington, D.C.:
Institute for Politics, Democracy & the Internet, 2004). JibJab
Media (www.jibjab.com) claims the video was seen 80 million
times.
This analysis of FEC disclosure records appears in Malbin, “A
Public Funding System in Jeopardy: Lessons from the Presidential
Nomination Contest of 2004.” Twenty-five percent of Al Gore’s
donors in 2000 and 21 percent of Bill Bradley’s gave $200 or
more to a presidential candidate in 2004. Ibid., p. 226.
Table 15
Did any of the following things prompt you to make your first contribution?
Donors who gave $100 or less
Donors who gave $500 or more
I received a letter in the mail from my candidate or party
46 %
34 %
I received an e-mail from my candidate or party
17 %
18 %
I received a telephone call from my candidate or party
15 %
11 %
I saw something during the presidential debates
22 %
15 %
I saw the candidate in person
12 %
15 %
I saw a political advertisement on TV
10 %
5%
I saw something in the news on TV
30 %
28 %
I saw something in a newspaper or magazine
30 %
29 %
I saw a political video online
5%
2%
A family member, friend, or colleague encouraged me to contribute
6%
18 %
Someone I knew told me he or she had made a contribution
2%
6%
I attended a Meetup.com event or house party
5%
6%
NOTE: Respondents could check more than one response.
SMALL DONORS AND ONLINE GIVING
| THE DYNAMICS OF POLITICAL GIVING | PAGE 21
www.IPDI.org
What is Meetup.com?
Meetup.com is a Web site (www.meetup.
com) that connects together people of similar
interests by facilitating offline gatherings.
People who share hobbies, similar backgrounds
or political ideals can find others with similar
interests, share information and organize online,
then meet locally.
The service was tremendously popular at
bringing together activists during the 2004
election, particularly supporters of Howard Dean
early in the election. During much of the campaign
supporters of Dean made up a large portion of
all Meetup members. More than a year after the
election the Democracy for America Meetups, an
offshoot of the Dean campaign, still comprised
more than 150,000 Meetup members.
The company raises revenue from fees paid by
meeting locations, site advertising and monthly
group fees.
FROM THE RESEARCH:
A quarter (24 percent) of all the
respondents who attended a Meetup
or house party said it prompted them
to make their first donation.
Kerry’s 2004 donors of $200 or more did not give to a
presidential candidate in 2000.
The importance of this finding for our subject is this:
If there is more churning for donors than professional
fundraisers and survey researchers once thought, that
means there is more opportunity for the next generation
of fundraisers and candidates to find new donors. It also
means there is more risk for those who rely on the same old
pool to keep giving. The 2004 election has shown us that
politics is more fluid than we once thought. That, in turn,
creates openings for those who can use new techniques,
and new means of communications, to persuade new
people to come into the system.
Future giving
Questions about future behavior can be unreliable.
Most people can’t tell you what they will do this weekend,
let alone next year. Nonetheless, questions about future
political plans help us assess someone’s intent and their
general interest in politics. The deeply alienated are more
likely to say they will opt out of future political involvement.
People who were pressed into becoming donors in 2004 –
by an interested spouse or a compelling issue, for example
– might announce their intention to stay away from politics
next time.
We asked donors whether they will return to donate or
volunteer in 2008, and there is strong sentiment from all
donors that they will give again. More than half of over$500 donors said they “strongly agree” that they will
give in 2008. If we ask donors if they would give in 2008
“regardless of who is running,” fewer agree, but we still find
a third of big donors committed to return in 2008. While
plenty of people are noncommittal, very few say they
definitely will not give again (less than 5 percent of small
donors and 3 percent of large donors).
Online donors are more optimistic than offline donors
that they will return as donors or volunteers in 2008. To
clarify this observation we used a regression analysis to
look at what predicts whether someone claims that they
will donate or volunteer in 2008. Regression allows us to
look at how two traits (or variables) are related, for example,
the relationship between party support and volunteering in
the future, while at the same time holding constant other
factors. We found some things we expected: People who
had given in the past and who considered themselves
strong party supporters plan to donate and volunteer in
2008. We also found that first-time volunteers were less
likely to say they will volunteer in 2008. New donors come
and go, and first-time donors are often one-time donors.8
Kerry voters were more likely to say they would return
in 2008, both as donors and as volunteers. This suggests
these donors remain polarized by the election. Quite
unexpectedly, we also found that online donors were more
likely to say they expect to donate money and volunteer
in 2008. In particular, being an online donor strongly
8
PAGE 22
See Appendix A for methodology.
| THE DYNAMICS OF POLITICAL GIVING | INSTITUTE FOR POLITICS, DEMOCRACY & THE INTERNET
www.IPDI.org
predicted that someone would wish to return to volunteer.
This illustrates how the Internet made it easier for many
people to volunteer, and how online involvement was part
of their deeper involvement in politics. We also believe this
is evidence of the empowering nature of online politics and
its potential to encourage political involvement.
Finally, the amount of money someone contributed did
not have any influence on whether they would donate again
in 2008. This is further support of our finding above that
the donor pool is more fluid. Here we see that big donors
were not more likely than small donors to say they would
return as donors.
Table 16
Frequency of giving in
presidential elections
Never
One election
Some elections
Most elections
Donors who gave Donors who gave
$100 or less
$500 or more
3%
1%
26 %
22 %
44 %
39 %
28 %
38 %
Summary
Table 17
Online giving took off in 2004, especially among donors
who were Democrats. Half the Democratic donors made at
least one contribution online. Online donors tended to be
younger, and this suggests that a lot of future giving may
move online, provided that the donor pool is sufficiently
motivated.
Almost half of the online donors who gave small
contributions and more than one-third who gave large
ones gave money without being asked. However, a majority
of donors give as a response to a prompting like a letter
or phone call. Direct mail is still the most important way
campaigns have to contact potential donors. The impact of
e-mail on the donation process is tempered by the fact that
e-mail addresses are not yet required on voter registration
forms or other sources of mailing lists. Campaigns culled
thousands of e-mail addresses from people who visited
Web sites, but prospecting for donors is still dominated by
direct mail.
Small donors get asked to donate by the campaigns less
often than large donors, but this difference is not great. The
big difference is when it comes to friends, family and work
colleagues. Large donors move in social circles with other
donors and those donors ask for money. A large donor is
three times as likely as a small donor to say that a friend or
colleague asked them for a donation.
Small donors online were surprisingly likely to refer to
political videos and Meetup events as motivations for their
first donations. Online political videos reached 8 percent of
small online donors, without the help of any major media
campaign. Meetups reached 8 percent of small online
donors, and 24 percent of all those who attended a Meetup
said it prompted their first donation. Meetups for small
donors and house parties for large donors were powerful
incentives to donate.
If we think about a political donation as the result of a
motivated person reacting to a political message at just the
right time, the importance of the Internet is in its reach. It
can provide significant content to large numbers of people
directly and cheaply. People who go online come in contact
with more messages, more often. The Internet helps small
donors connect with these “messages,” whether that
means a campaign’s Web site or an e-mail from a friend
suggesting they make a political contribution. Online small
Percentage who plan to donate in
2008
SMALL DONORS AND ONLINE GIVING
Online donors
Offline donors
Donors who gave
$100 or less
47 %
35 %
Donors who gave
$500 or more
56 %
48 %
Table 18
Percentage who plan to donate in
2008, regardless of who is running
Online donors
Offline donors
Donors who gave
$100 or less
25 %
20 %
Donors who gave
$500 or more
34 %
27 %
Table 19
Percentage who plan to volunteer in
2008
Online donors
Offline donors
“
Donors who gave
$100 or less
23 %
6%
Donors who gave
$500 or more
21 %
12 %
A very important client of my
husband, who was a member
of the Republican Party and
had pledged to raise a specific
amount of money, strongly
suggested that we each make a
contribution.
”
— a 33-year-old George Bush donor
from New York.
| THE DYNAMICS OF POLITICAL GIVING | PAGE 23
www.IPDI.org
donors are more likely than offline small donors to
be asked to donate – by campaigns, friends or family
members. Online donors are also more likely to say they
will return as donors or volunteers, reflecting how the
Internet has made it easier for people to get involved
and engaged online.
PAGE 24
| THE DYNAMICS OF POLITICAL GIVING | INSTITUTE FOR POLITICS, DEMOCRACY & THE INTERNET
www.IPDI.org
DONOR MOTIVATIONS
We now move from questions that asked about
the first donation to questions that address donor
motivations overall. What motivates donors to give?
Any discussion about why people gave money to the
presidential campaigns in 2004 must begin with the
observation that this was primarily an election about
President George W. Bush. Democrats were strongly
dissatisfied with the incumbent and Republicans
supported him. The most frequent unsolicited
comments in personal interviews with Democrats
concerned animosity toward President Bush and a
desire to defeat him in the election. While dislike for
John Kerry was also voiced by Republican donors, it
was mentioned less frequently and with less passion
than by those who disliked the president. This partisan
divide in 2004 was an important factor in motivating
many people to donate (and to vote). All the other
reasons for giving money in 2004 must be considered
in this context.
The sentiment is strongest on the Democratic
side, especially among large donors. When asked an
open-ended question about why they contributed to a
candidate – with no prompting – 44 percent of large
donors to Kerry (who gave $500 or more) and 32
percent of small donors to Kerry (who gave $100 or
less) had something negative to say about the opposing
candidate or party. The animosity toward the opponent
was less strong among donors to Bush.
We conducted some simple linear regression to
tease out which traits were most closely associated
with negative feelings toward the opposition. We
combined two survey questions where donors could
express their dislike for the opposing candidate or
party and compared them to other variables. First,
we predictably found that people who considered
themselves strong party supporters or ideologues were
more likely to express negative feelings toward the
opposition. Controlling for that variable, we found that
Kerry voters were indeed significantly more likely to
express negative feelings to the president, reinforcing
our findings above.1
The open-ended responses also showed that Bush
donors liked their candidate more than Kerry donors.
1
See Appendix A for methodology.
Bush donors, especially large donors, were more likely
than Kerry donors to offer positive comments about
Bush and to talk about the president’s character, such
as his integrity, honesty or strength. Iraq, Afghanistan
and the war on terror were mentioned less often as a
reason for making a donation.
When respondents were prompted for a negative
response the sentiment was overwhelming. We asked
whether “the candidate’s opponent is unacceptable”
and about 70 percent of both small and large donors
said that was a “very important” factor in their decision
to donate. Here we see again that large donors to Kerry
were more likely to say that Bush was unacceptable
(82 percent, compared to 51 percent of large donors to
Bush).
This difference was smaller when we look just at
the small donors, and this was true of the open-ended
responses as well. Both sets of small donors said they
found the opposing candidate unacceptable. But about
the same number of Bush donors said something
positive about their candidate while this was not true of
the Kerry donors. This adds some understanding to one
of the broad assumptions about the 2004 campaign –
that small donors were particularly driven to contribute
by their animosity toward the opponent. There was
significant donor anger among both small and large
donors, but anger toward the opponent was greatest
among large donors to John Kerry.
One of the beliefs among fundraisers is that big
donors return every year regardless of who is running,
and are less driven by animosity or partisanship. They
“invest” in candidates for business and social reasons.
We looked at the 154 donors in our data whose average
donation was at least $1,000. They are not essentially
different from other large donors.2 Our sample is small
here, but we cannot support the assumption that very
large donors were different. They expressed just as
much animosity toward the opponent as donors who
gave less.
The next most frequent reasons cited by donors
2
Among these $1,000 donors, 22 percent of Bush donors and 38
percent of Kerry donors made negative comments in response to
the open-ended question; 60 percent of Bush donors and 76 percent of Kerry donors agreed that “the opponent is unacceptable.”
These percentages are close to the other donor groups.
SMALL DONORS AND ONLINE GIVING
| DONOR MOTIVATIONS | PAGE 25
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Thinking about the
presidential candidate to
whom you contributed the
most money, please tell us
why you contributed to this
candidate
Table 20
Percentage who made a negative
comment about the opposing
candidate/party
Bush donors
Kerry donors
Donors who gave
$100 or less
19 %
32 %
Donors who gave
$500 or more
15 %
44 %
Table 21
Percentage who made a positive
comment about their candidate/
party
Bush donors
Kerry donors
Donors who gave
$100 or less
56 %
46 %
Donors who gave
$500 or more
62 %
35 %
Table 22
Percentage who mention integrity,
honesty or strength of their
candidate
Bush donors
Kerry donors
Donors who gave
$100 or less
26 %
8%
Donors who gave
$500 or more
37 %
10 %
Table 23
Percentage who mentioned Iraq or
terrorism
Bush donors
Kerry donors
“
Donors who gave
$100 or less
9%
6%
Donors who gave
$500 or more
13 %
12 %
Though tiny, my contributions
were meant as a signal of
encouragement to that rarest of
candidates, an honest man.
”
were leadership traits and the positions of the candidates,
such as their ideology or their positions on economic, social
and moral issues. More than half of the respondents cite
these factors as very important. Scholars have identified
several broad types of motives that influence political
activists and donors. The most prevalent are purposive
motives, where donors give money because they want to
encourage the adoption of policies and candidates with
which they agree.3 It appears that small donors are more
likely to cite purposive motives for their donations: They
are more ideological and issue driven.
Donors with material motives try to encourage
candidates who they think will be beneficial to their business
or financial status. We see this much less frequently. The
sentiment is strongest among donors to President Bush,
who are more likely to give money because “the candidate
will treat my business fairly.”
Finally, donors with solidary motives give because of
social benefits such as meeting candidates or attending
political events. This appears even less frequently than
other motives – less than 5 percent of donors found these
“very important.” Many fundraising professionals have
adopted the terms ideologues, investors, and intimates to
make largely the same distinction between donors.
Bush donors are more likely to cite the candidate’s
liberalism or conservatism (presumably conservatism).
They are also more likely to say that President Bush was
strongest for their party and was a good leader, reflecting
the more positive opinions Bush donors offered for their
candidate.
Kerry donors are more likely to say they gave because
their candidate was likely to win. This response may be due
to supporters of other candidates rallying around Kerry
as it became clear he would become the nominee. Kerry
donors were also more likely to donate as a way to influence
government policies, which may indicate discontent over
the war in Iraq.
Finally, we conducted statistical analyses to tease out
some of the relationships among donor characteristics,
motivation and size of donation. Did big donors give money
to promote business? Are small donors more interested
in the candidate’s views? First, we sorted the questions
into three related groups. Most people answered these
questions consistently. The first index was comprised of
questions about the candidate’s views – the conservatism/
liberalism and the economic, social and moral views of the
candidate. Donors who gave these reasons were considered
to have given for purposive motives. We found that strongly
partisan people were more likely to cite these reasons. We
also found that women and lower income people were a
little more likely to cite these reasons than men or higher
income donors, but the driving force here was ideology.
The second index was comprised of questions about the
social and business reasons to contribute to a candidate
– enjoying social contacts, attending events, and the belief
that the candidate could help your business. These are
— a 60-year-old Ralph Nader donor.
PAGE 26
3
Francia et al., “Individual Donors in the 1996 Federal Elections.”
| DONOR MOTIVATIONS | INSTITUTE FOR POLITICS, DEMOCRACY & THE INTERNET
www.IPDI.org
solidary and material motives We expected that big
donors or high-income donors would be more likely to
cite these reasons, but surprisingly they did not do so.
Finally, we created a third index of pragmatic
questions. People who answered affirmatively to these
questions said they contributed because “the candidate
is likely to win” or is “strongest for my party.” They were
practical considerations. Here we see that how much
money someone donated was important, but only
slightly so. This suggests that people who give more
might be more likely to consider whether their money
is well spent on a winner, and less likely to invest in a
losing cause. But this is not the most important factor
here; ideology is again most important, and Kerry voters
were most likely to give these responses. These results
may partly be due to the fact that all of Kerry’s small
donors in our sample came from other candidates’
matching fund submission files, but we find at least as
much instrumental giving among Kerry’s large donors
as among the small ones.4
Summary
We see little evidence to support the concern that
small donors tend to be more polarized and more
negative than large donors. Large donors to George
4
See Appendix A for methodology.
Bush scored lower on the questions about animosity
than did either set of small donors, but Kerry’s small
donors were more negative than Bush’s and large
donors to Kerry were the most negative of the four
groups.
Large donors to Bush scored higher on some of the
material motives (“the candidate will treat my business
fairly”), which might be expected. At the same time, in
the regression analysis income did not predict these
material responses. So while large donors to President
Bush (giving $500 or more) were more likely to report
these motives, income alone is not the driving factor.
We also note the positive reasons donors offered.
Large donors to President Bush were the most likely
of all donors to give a positive comment about the
president. Large donors to John Kerry were the least
likely to offer a positive comment about their candidate
(and most likely to offer a negative comment about the
opponent).
In general, donors mostly mentioned the candidates’
political views as their reasons for donating money.
These are people with purposive motives, or what
some fundraisers call ideologues. The social aspects
of making a contribution fell far behind, such as giving
money to attend events or meet people. As we saw in
the regression analysis, partisanship drives purposive
motives. Kerry donors were more likely to give pragmatic
responses, especially saying “the candidate is likely to
Table 24
Why Donors Give
Donors who gave $100 or less
Donors who gave $500 or more
Bush Donors
Kerry Donors
Bush Donors
Kerry Donors
The candidate’s opponent is unacceptable
70 %
77 %
51 %
82 %
A candidate’s liberalism/conservatism
70 %
52 %
57 %
50 %
Candidate’s position on economic issues
55 %
61 %
52 %
52 %
Candidate’s views on social/moral issues
71 %
61 %
53 %
57 %
The candidate will treat my business fairly
22 %
10 %
22 %
4%
I enjoy the friendships and social contacts
2%
3%
4%
1%
The contribution involved an event I wanted to attend
0%
2%
1%
1%
The candidate is friendly to my industry or work
5%
6%
8%
3%
The candidate is likely to win the election
11 %
21 %
8%
25 %
The candidate is the strongest for my party
46 %
32 %
44 %
29 %
The candidate is a good leader
67 %
49 %
68 %
42 %
As a way to influence government policies
32 %
41 %
24 %
35 %
A group I respect supported the candidate
12 %
13 %
9%
10 %
NOTE: Respondents could check more than one response.
SMALL DONORS AND ONLINE GIVING
| DONOR MOTIVATIONS | PAGE 27
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“
Although Howard Dean would
have been my first choice, the
largest part of my contributions
went to John Kerry because I
strongly wanted President Bush
”
to be defeated.
— a 77-year-old John Kerry donor
from Maryland.
“
My motivating, the whole
drive, was to try and identify
a candidate who had the best
likelihood of beating George
Bush.
”
win the election.” We see this as mostly the result of the
supporters of other Democratic candidates rallying behind
Kerry after his nomination became clear.
The prevailing wisdom is that large donors give money
to help their candidate win or to gain something, usually
access to a politician. We find support for the former claim
but not the latter. Donors give money to candidates they
like and with whom they agree. Many donors said they
contributed because of their positive feelings toward a
candidate, especially those who voted for President Bush.
Coupled with this is the large portion of donors who cite
their candidate’s political philosophy and positions on the
issues. The more ideologically extreme they were the more
likely they were to cite these purposive reasons.
The belief that big donors contribute to a candidate
to help their business is somewhat supported here. We
could not specifically identify business owners in our data,
but donors to President Bush cited these reasons. At the
same time, donors who earned more money or donated
larger amounts (two things that are closely related) were
not more likely to say they contribute money because the
candidate would help their business or industry. Certainly
in our individual interviews with donors several said they
gave money because a business colleague suggested it or
because they felt it would help their business, but in these
cases the help to the business was coming from the social
pressure of other donors, not from the candidate. No one
said they gave money hoping that their business would
benefit from legislation.
Finally, in our personal interviews we found donors whom
we call “pragmatic donors,” and most of these were small
donors to also-ran candidates. These donors expressed
pragmatic, even politically strategic, motives for making a
donation. They were politically savvy and knowledgeable of
campaign strategies such as raising money to dissuade a
potential opponent or to show a burst of popular support.
They liked the candidates they contributed money to,
but did not necessarily expect or even want them to win.
Their donations were instead aimed at encouraging the
democratic process or keeping an alternative viewpoint
in the campaign. They wanted a candidate they believed
would lose to nonetheless stay in the race longer. They
wanted a candidate’s positions heard, even if they did not
fully support those positions. They gave money as a protest
or out of a sense of duty. These donors do not neatly fit in to
the typical explanations we use to explain why people give
money to a political candidate.
— a 52-year-old John Kerry donor
from Ohio.
PAGE 28
| DONOR MOTIVATIONS | INSTITUTE FOR POLITICS, DEMOCRACY & THE INTERNET
www.IPDI.org
ONLINE BEHAVIOR
Donors are wired. Ninety-six percent of large donors
and 82 percent of small donors have gone online.1 As
we saw earlier, they have taken to online giving very
quickly, and they use the Internet to obtain political
information.
Donors look for political information at online
news sites, party Web sites and political blogs. As we
might expect, donors are much more likely than typical
Internet users to look for political information online,
and about twice as likely to visit their candidate’s
Web site.2 All these activities are closely related, so
people who visited a political discussion group, for
example, were likely to visit a political news site or
blog. Interestingly, there is a high correlation between
visiting the Web site of your candidate and visiting the
opponent’s Web site.3
Small donors and large donors are very similar
regarding these online information-seeking activities,
although large donors are a little more active online.
Because of our special interest in online behavior, we
again used linear regression to see which factors were
related to seeking out information online by visiting
political and news Web sites, chat rooms and blogs.4
We created a single index from six questions about
online political activity to create a single measure of
seeking political information online. Our strategy was
to remove the influence of demographic variables and
then see whether political party and donation size
mattered. The results were largely as we expected.
Younger people and Democrats were more likely to
look for political information online, but age was really
the strongest influence. This corresponds with what
we know about the campaign. Early Dean supporters
were more likely to be online and later Kerry supporters
were more likely to donate online. IPDI has found that
the online political discussion community in 2003 was
dominated by Dean supporters, and we see evidence of
1
To determine if respondents had gone online they were asked
“Do you ever go online to access the Internet or to get e-mail?”
2
Lee Rainie, Michael Cornfield, and John Horrigan, “The Internet
and Campaign 2004,” (Washington, D.C.: Pew Internet & American Life Project, The Pew Research Center For The People & the
Press, 2005).
3
For all donors, Pearson’s correlation coefficient of .578, p < .001.
4
See Appendix A for methodology.
that again here.5
Finally, income and the size of the donation did
not influence whether someone looked for political
information online. The barriers to entry are very low
for online information-seeking, and the likelihood of
a donor using the Internet for political information is
not affected by how much money the household earns.
The Internet levels the playing field a bit between small
donors and large donors, who otherwise would have
greater resources at their disposal to obtain political
information. We also note that donating online is
strongly related to online information gathering.
The 2004 election marked the first national election
with the widespread use of political e-mail to organize
supporters and solicit contributions. Both parties sent
out millions of e-mails to enormous mailing lists. IPDI
collected more than 900 different e-mails sent from
the two major campaigns and national parties in the
last six months of the campaign. (The Institute’s
database of political e-mails during the election, which
is hardly comprehensive, includes state party and 527
organization e-mail, and numbers more than 5,000
pieces from the last six months of the campaign.)
This e-mail coverage saturated the donor base – 80
percent of donors got political e-mail. In fact, people
who did not donate online often told us – both in the
survey and in interviews later – that they did not do so
for fear of giving out personal information and getting
spammed. Democrats were more likely to get lots of
e-mail: 45 percent of Democrat large donors and 35
percent of Democrat small donors got political e-mail
“almost every day.” The same factors were at play here,
including the active online campaigns in the primaries
and the emphasis on online donations by the Kerry
campaign. Republicans were much less likely to get
that much e-mail.
Finally, we looked at a political activity that really took
off in 2004 – forwarding political e-mail on to others.
While forwarding political e-mail is hardly as valuable
to the campaign as donating money, it is nonetheless
5
Joseph Graf et al., “Working Paper: Online Political Discussion
Groups in the 2004 Presidential Campaign: A Pilot Study Survey
of Discussion Group Leaders,” (Washington, D.C.: Institute for
Politics, Democracy & the Internet, 2004), Graf and Darr, “Political Influentials Online in the 2004 Presidential Campaign.”
SMALL DONORS AND ONLINE GIVING
| ONLINE BEHAVIOR | PAGE 29
www.IPDI.org
a means by which interested citizens advertised
their political positions and sought support for their
candidates. Campaigns and advocacy groups have
made a special effort to encourage their supporters to
e-mail others. On the campaign Web sites the process
was automated.
Online donors were far more likely to forward email. Among people who received e-mail, 70 percent of
online donors admitted they forwarded some along to
others. Small donors do so as frequently as large donors.
If they received e-mail, Democrats and Republicans
were just as likely to forward it.
Summary
Obtaining political information is the first step
toward becoming an engaged citizen: education, media
use and political knowledge are indicators of political
involvement. But obtaining information costs time and
money, and researchers for years have argued that
those with resources – usually the well-off – can spend
the time and money to learn about politics. We suggest
that the Internet reduces that barrier to entry. Small
donors can get political information online as readily as
large donors, and political e-mail is a means for them to
stay informed and easily communicate with others.
Table 25
Online Activity
Donors who gave $100 or less
Donors who gave $500 or more
Go anywhere online to get political information?
63 %
74 %
Visit the Web site of your political party or candidate?
53 %
66 %
Visit the Web site of another party or candidate?
33 %
37 %
In the past year, did you...
Visit a political discussion group or chat room online?
15 %
15 %
Visit a news Web site , such as CNN.com, MSNBC.com, or FoxNews.com?
61 %
70 %
Visit a Web log (or blog) that discusses politics or current events?
33 %
35 %
Table 26
Table 27
Percentage who received political
e-mail “almost every day”
Percentage who have forwarded
political e-mail to someone else
Republicans
Democrats
Donors who gave
$100 or less
8%
35 %
Donors who gave
$500 or more
15 %
45 %
Online donors
Offline donors
Donors who gave
$100 or less
72 %
49 %
NOTE: Of respondents who received e-mail.
PAGE 30
| ONLINE BEHAVIOR | INSTITUTE FOR POLITICS, DEMOCRACY & THE INTERNET
Donors who gave
$500 or more
70 %
44 %
www.IPDI.org
POLITICAL INVOLVEMENT
Making a political contribution is an act of political
participation, much like planting a political sign in the
front yard or voting, but it is an act that has obvious
costs. Few Americans are willing to take the effort
to contribute to a campaign, and those who do are
engaged in their communities in myriad ways. They
participate locally and are influential among their
friends and neighbors.
“Influentials” is a term adopted by RoperASW to
describe the small segment of the general public that is
disproportionately influential with everyone else.1 The
defining characteristic of influentials is their activist
orientation toward life, and it can apply to many different
things. Influentials are the people who recommend to
their friends music, movies or restaurants. They collect
information and opinions about the things important
in their lives, and they communicate that information
to networks of friends, family and colleagues. Their
influence is disproportionate because of the number of
people they communicate with and the degree to which
others turn to them for advice and information. Prior
research at IPDI has found that political activists online
early in the 2004 presidential campaign tended to be
influentials. Nearly 70 percent of these online activists
qualified as influentials, in contrast to 10 percent of the
general public.2
Political donors were much more likely to be
influentials, and large donors were only slightly more
likely than small donors to be influentials. Donors are
far more likely than the general public to be involved in
communication activities (writing letters to politicians
and the media) and political activism (joining parties
or advocacy groups and attending political functions).
When it comes to some activities that require much
more commitment, such as holding office or making
a speech, donors are more like regular citizens. Only a
1
Ed Keller and Jon Berry, The Influentials (NewYork: The Free Press,
2003). Influentials are determined by their responses to 11 questions about political activity. See question 25 of the survey in appendix B.
2
Graf and Darr, “Political Influentials Online in the 2004 Presidential Campaign.”
very few people are committed to their community to
that degree.
Having Internet access helps. Small donors with
Internet access are nearly as likely as large donors to
score high on the index and be considered influentials.
Small donors generally fall behind large donors
in their rate of volunteering. About 60 percent of
large donors and 45 percent of small donors have
been political volunteers at one time or another. It is
interesting, however, that only about 12 percent of large
donors are “hard-core” volunteers who show up in
most elections. We saw above that most donors are, at
times, non-donors. They do not give in every election,
but pick and choose. Here we see that they pick and
choose in their volunteering as well. There are elections
where large donors – active in their communities –
nonetheless choose to remain on the sidelines.
Donors were actively involved in other ways by
asking others to support or give money to a candidate.
This activity may be the most important to political
campaigns. Personal influence is powerful. Campaigns
know this, and they focused on enormous grassroots
efforts in the 2004 election. More than a third of large
donors said they asked someone else to contribute,
twice as many as the small donors. Donors respond
to these personal requests. As we saw earlier, large
donors move in networks of donors who get asked to
make donations and ask others to give.
There is an important pattern among small donors
who donate online. Their level of political activity –
soliciting others or attending social events – is much
closer to that of large donors. Being politically active
online (illustrated by their willingness to donate online)
closes the gap in political involvement between large
and small donors. The Internet makes it easier to ask
someone else to support your candidate and to ask for
money. Asking someone online is less confrontational
than doing so in person, and the campaigns made it
easy to solicit friends with boilerplate e-mails, phone
lists and other tools on their Web sites. We found this
combination to be particularly intriguing and hopeful
regarding the question of whether the Internet is
helping to further democratize electoral politics.
SMALL DONORS AND ONLINE GIVING
| POLITICAL INVOLVEMENT | PAGE 31
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Table 28
Percentage who tried to convince
someone to support their candidate
Online donors
Offline donors
Donors who gave
$100 or less
77 %
57 %
Donors who gave
$500 or more
79 %
65 %
Table 29
Percentage who solicited money for a
candidate from someone else
Online donors
Offline donors
Donors who gave
$100 or less
27 %
12 %
Donors who gave
$500 or more
40 %
30 %
House parties and Meetup events were far more
important in fundraising than we realized. About forty
percent of large donors said they attended a house party for
a candidate, much more than small donors. Both campaigns
used online tools to try to facilitate house parties. While
large donors used house parties, small donors and online
donors were more drawn to Meetups. Meetup events
are advertised and organized online, and Howard Dean
supporters were early and enthusiastic users of the
Meetup events (although Meetup.com is nonpartisan).
There is evidence from the 2004 campaign that people
who attended political Meetups were more likely to donate
money, volunteer, and lobby others for their candidate.3
In donor interviews we encountered many donors
putting house parties to use in original ways. Parties were
hosted where money was not solicited or parties became
regular social events. In one case a donor talked about his
efforts to invite activists on both sides for a conciliatory,
nonpartisan political house party immediately after the
election.
House parties also may have been an avenue into
politics for volunteers. Of all the first-time volunteers, 42
percent reported they attended a Meetup.com political
event and 44 percent said they attended a house party.
Table 30
Summary
Percentage who attended a
Meetup.com event
The data show that the Internet is leveling the playing
field. Small donors lack the resources and social networks
that large donors have, but the Internet in 2004 helped
connect them in ways that made up for fewer resources.
Online small donors are just as likely as large donors to
try to convince someone to support their candidate, and
soliciting others to donate seems particularly spurred by
being online. The Internet has made these solicitations
easier and removed the advantage enjoyed by those
who make large donations and circulate within the donor
community.
Roughly 30 percent of donors who asked others to
donate said they asked more than 20 people. These
“activist donors” appear equally among small and large
donors. Most people further reported they contacted others
in person or by phone. If we just pull out these “activist
donors” who contacted many others, we find that only a
quarter of them used e-mail to solicit money from others.
This an interesting result: When donors ask others to give
money, they did not just blast an e-mail to 20 people they
knew. They were very likely to use the phone.
This is essentially an example of influentials behavior.
Contacting others illustrates the communication and
activist behavior that influentials exhibit. Influentials
have the network of contacts and are willing to use their
Online donors
Offline donors
Donors who gave
$100 or less
27 %
8%
Donors who gave
$500 or more
19 %
11 %
Table 31
Percentage who attended a house
party
Online donors
Offline donors
Donors who gave
$100 or less
26 %
15 %
Donors who gave
$500 or more
40 %
37 %
3
PAGE 32
Christine B. Williams and Bruce D. Weinberg, “When Online and Offline Politics ‘Meetup:’ an Examination of the Phenomenon, Presidential Campaign and Its Citizen Activists” (paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Chicago,
Ill., September 2-5 2004).
| POLITICAL INVOLVEMENT | INSTITUTE FOR POLITICS, DEMOCRACY & THE INTERNET
www.IPDI.org
Figure 3
influence with others by asking them to donate. Influentials
are three times more likely to ask someone else to donate,
and once they do that they are much more likely to contact
large numbers of people.
We are thus left with a tantalizing question begging
further study: Can the Internet create influentials, and if so,
how, precisely does that happen?4
Percentage of donors who
are influentials
62%
53%
10%
General
Public
Donors who
gave $100
or less
Donors who
gave $500
or more
Figure 4
Percentage of donors who are
influentials, by whether they have
Internet access or not
69%
66%
HAVE
ACCESS
44%
Donors who gave
$100 or less
HAVE
ACCESS
56%
Donors who gave
$500 or less
Table 32
Frequency of volunteering in
presidential elections
4
See Grant Reeher, Larry Elin, and Steve Davis, The Political Life of the
Internet (New York: New York University Press, forthcoming).
Most elections
Some elections
One election
Never
SMALL DONORS AND ONLINE GIVING
Donors who gave
$100 or less
6%
21 %
18 %
55 %
Donors who gave
$500 or more
12 %
32 %
19 %
38 %
| POLITICAL INVOLVEMENT | PAGE 33
www.IPDI.org
PAGE 34
| ATTITUDES AND OPINIONS | INSTITUTE FOR POLITICS, DEMOCRACY & THE INTERNET
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ATTITUDES AND OPINIONS
We now turn to donors’ attitudes toward current
issues, their partisanship, and their feelings toward
campaign finance. For most of these questions we did
not expect much difference between online and offline
donors. For example, we did not believe that online
donors would be more likely to support the death
penalty than offline donors, and they did not. However,
we were unsure whether there would be ideological
differences between small donors and large donors.
The increase in donors was due in part to a polarizing
election, but we did not know if small donors were
more likely to be strongly partisan. Finally, we certainly
expected differences based on political orientation.
Consequently, much of this analysis centers on
differences between Democrats and Republicans.
Political donors are deeply divided, both on ideology
and on the issues. Political donors are very likely to
identify themselves as “strong” party members or
“strong” liberals or conservatives, as have political
donors in past elections.1 Whereas most of the
general public clusters in the middle of the political or
ideological axis, most donors place themselves toward
the poles.
There was a wide gulf between Bush and Kerry
donors on a variety of social issues. In some cases, the
differences between each side on issues such as gay
marriage were enormous. For example, whereas 74
percent of the Bush donors agreed with the statement
“Government should enact laws to restrict gay
marriage,” 90 percent of Kerry donors disagreed.
We see similar wide disagreement when respondents
were asked questions about reducing taxes, allowing
people to invest some Social Security funds, providing
health insurance for the uninsured, making the death
penalty mandatory, and spending more to reduce
poverty. The differences were greatest on gay marriage,
and the smallest divide was for the death penalty. But
even here, more than 55 percent of Bush donors agreed
the death penalty should be mandatory, compared to
less than 10 percent of the Kerry donors.
Large and small donors differed on two social issues.
Here we analyzed Bush and Kerry donors separately to
control for partisanship. Small donors were more likely
than large donors to agree that “government should
enact laws to restrict gay marriage” and “mandatory
death penalty for murder should be the law.” Small
donors and large donors did not differ on the other
economic and social issues of whether “government
should provide health insurance for the uninsured” or
whether “government should spend more money to
reduce poverty.” Bush donors and Kerry donors still
are far apart on these issues, but within each group,
small donors are more socially conservative than large
donors on these issues.
Among donors to John Kerry, small donors differed
from large donors on the statement “taxes should be
cut even if it means reducing public services.” Small
donors to Kerry, while still tending to disagree with
that statement, were nonetheless more conservative in
their overall response. Here small donors appear to be
more economically conservative on this issue.2
Finally, we looked at two questions that address
polarization. Small donors to Bush are no more likely
than large donors to Bush to be party ideologues and
place themselves at the end of the party spectrum. This
was also true of Kerry donors. However, we found that
small donors were generally more conservative than
large donors when we asked them to place themselves
on an ideological scale from “strong conservative” to
“strong liberal.” Again, Bush donors and Kerry donors
are far apart on this scale, but within each group, small
donors consider themselves more conservative than
large donors.
1
2
Brown, Powell, and Wilcox, Serious Money: Fundraising and Contributing in Presidential Nomination Campaigns.
Alienation and Cynicism
The subtext of American political campaigns is
cynicism, and this is no more evident than in online
communications. With Web sites and e-mail the
parties have the capability to communicate rapidly in
a personalized manner with their core, the volunteers
and fundraisers who make up the grassroots. Based
on the thousands of pieces of political e-mail collected
by IPDI, much of this communication is cynical and
negative.
Mean scores were compared using one-way ANOVA and all relationships were significant at p < .05 or better.
SMALL DONORS AND ONLINE GIVING
| ATTITUDES AND OPINIONS | PAGE 35
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Figure 5
Donor attitudes
“Taxes should be cut even if it means
reducing public services”
62%
34%
1%
Strongly Agree
1%
Strongly Disagree
NOTE: Bars represent percentages of Kerry and Bush donors.
“People should be able to invest
some Social Security funds”
62%
45%
1%
Strongly Agree
2%
Strongly Disagree
NOTE: Bars represent percentages of Kerry and Bush donors.
“Government should enact laws to
restrict gay marriage”
73%
46%
2%
Strongly Agree
5%
Strongly Disagree
Political donors were generally fairly negative about
the state of the country, and especially about the state of
the economy in the next 10 years. As we would expect,
Kerry voters were much more negative than Bush voters,
and especially so when asked whether “the United States
is headed in the right direction.” However, more than 30
percent of Bush voters agreed with the statement “I worry
that my children will not have the opportunities I had.”
(More than 60 percent of Kerry donors agreed.) We found
no significant differences between small and large donors.
We also grouped together a set of questions dealing
with alienation from government and politicians. This
index included questions about whether politicians do the
right thing or whether government is responsive to the
people. However, the questions were more broad and less
partisan.3 We again find that the supporters of the party
out of power are more alienated than Bush supporters, but
this is unrelated to whether the donor was a small or large
donor. Small donors are no more or less alienated than
large donors.
The campaign finance system
The passage of campaign finance reform in 2002 was
the culmination of a long political fight that included years
of lobbying and research by public interest organizations,
nonprofit foundations and political groups. In waging
this battle, campaign finance reform was elevated in the
consciousness of many Americans. Many people heard
about and came to care about campaign finance reform
who would not otherwise have paid it much attention. Sen.
John McCain in particular emphasized reform in his 2000
campaign for the presidency. This heightened awareness
showed up in the attitudes donors had toward campaign
finance reform in research conducted on the 1996 and
2000 campaigns.4
Prior to the passage of campaign finance reform, surveys
showed that donors were generally critical of the means
by which campaigns were funded. Donors were actually
more in favor of reform than the general public, especially
banning soft money and limiting campaign spending. Even
though there were differences along party lines, there had
emerged a fairly strong consensus among donors that
reform of some type would be a good thing.
Those feelings of discontent with campaign financing
remain more than two years after the passage of BCRA.
A majority of donors from both parties thinks that the
campaign finance system “has problems and needs to be
changed” or worse. Sentiment is much stronger among
the Democrats. They were much more extreme in their
dislike of the campaign finance system and their desire
for change. More than 40 percent of Democrats who
contributed $500 or more gave the most critical response.
NOTE: Bars represent percentages of Kerry and Bush donors.
PAGE 36
3
See appendix A for the makeup and statistical analyses of indices.
4
Research into donor attitudes toward campaign finance reform in
1996 and 2000 includes Peter Francia et al., “Donor Dissent: Congressional Contributors Rethink Giving,” Public Perspective, July/August
2000, Wilcox et al., “With Limits Raised, Who Will Give More? The
Impact of BCRA on Individual Donors.”
| ATTITUDES AND OPINIONS | INSTITUTE FOR POLITICS, DEMOCRACY & THE INTERNET
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Figure 6
Only a small percentage claimed the system was sound
– about 5 percent of Republicans and less than 1 percent
of Democrats. These results are similar to the discontent
seen in surveys of presidential donors in 2000. So far, the
campaign finance reform passed in 2002 has done little to
alter public opinion. This dislike of the campaign finance
system is the one element of partisan consensus among
the issues we polled, although we doubt that the consensus
would remain if we asked for proposed solutions.
In our discussions with donors it was apparent there is
discontent over campaign financing and great suspicion
that legislation can fix it. Respondents tend to lump
campaign finance together with their own negative feelings
about politics in general, especially gerrymandered political
districting, which was mentioned by several donors. (This
survey was conducted before the Jack Abramoff scandal
broke into the news.) Donors favor transparency in political
giving, but at the same time a few were a little uncomfortable
when transparency hit close to home. When they received
our mailed questionnaire, several donors called to express
surprise that their names were publicly available. When
several Web sites posted FEC donor information during the
2004 election, some complaints were made that this was
an infringement on personal privacy.5
Donor attitudes
“Government should provide health
insurance for the uninsured”
50%
15%
3%
2%
Strongly Agree
Strongly Disagree
NOTE: Bars represent percentages of Kerry and Bush donors.
“Mandatory death penalty for
murder should be the law”
53%
26%
Summary
Whereas many Americans fall in the middle of the
political spectrum, donors congregate toward the ends.
Many consider themselves strong conservatives/liberals
or strong Democrats/Republicans. They are also deeply
divided along a range of social issues, such as the death
penalty, spending more to alleviate poverty, or restricting
gay marriage. Small donors are more conservative than
large donors on social issues, and are also more likely to
place themselves in a more conservative position on an
ideological scale.
Democrats are also fairly alienated, although this is may
better characterized as discontent at being the party out
of power. General alienation toward the political process
is much less prevalent among Republicans. Despite the
passage of campaign finance reform in 2002, donors
remain unhappy with campaign finance regulations and are
suspicious about reform.
2%
Strongly Agree
6%
Strongly Disagree
NOTE: Bars represent percentages of Kerry and Bush donors.
“Government should spend more to
reduce poverty in the U.S.”
47%
20%
2%
1%
Strongly Agree
Strongly Disagree
NOTE: Bars represent percentages of Kerry and Bush donors.
Table 33
Percentage who say campaign
finance “is broken and needs to be
replaced”
5
Julie Hinds, “Campaign Cash: It’s on the Web: Who Gave What to
Whom,” Detroit Free Press, 12 April 2004, Knight Ridder News Service,
“Campaign Donation Site Points to Giver,” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel,
27 April 2004, Leslie Walker, “Political Money, Tracked to Your Door,”
The Washington Post, 28 March 2004.
Republicans
Democrats
SMALL DONORS AND ONLINE GIVING
Donors who gave
$100 or less
16 %
42 %
Donors who gave
$500 or more
14 %
45 %
| ATTITUDES AND OPINIONS | PAGE 37
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PAGE 38
| FIRST-TIME DONORS | INSTITUTE FOR POLITICS, DEMOCRACY & THE INTERNET
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FIRST-TIME DONORS
The surge in donors in the 2004 campaign was
almost universally praised as one of the few positive
aspects of a negative campaign. As we have discussed
elsewhere, there is a consensus that more donors is
a sign of a healthy democracy. However, one concern
about this increase in donors was whether they would
be more polarized or ideologically extreme. Here we
examined whether these new donors differ from donors
who have given in the past.
In trying to estimate how many donors were firsttime donors we looked at only those donors who gave
$200 or more in order to compare the data to past
surveys. Eighteen percent of donors who gave $200
or more said that their donation in the 2004 election
was the first time they had ever given money to a
candidate or political party. This is roughly similar to
estimates from the 2000 election. Data from donors
who gave $200 or more in 2000 suggest that roughly
one in four were first-time givers. In both the 2000 and
2004 elections, donors who gave less than $200 were
slightly more likely to say they were contributing to a
presidential candidate for the first time.1
This suggests that the proportion of large donors
who gave for the first time in 2004 was roughly the
same, or maybe even a little less, than in 2000. We
know that the total number of donors at least tripled
from 2000 to 2004. So while many donors were giving
for the first time, many occasional federal donors
who did not give to a presidential candidate in 2000
were motivated to do so in 2004. As we found earlier,
many donors are not habitual donors, so they give in
one election and not in another. The 2004 campaign
motivated many non-donors and these irregular donors
to make a contribution in this election cycle.
Our data suggest that there was a higher proportion
of first-time donors among people who considered
themselves independents than those who said they
were Democrats or Republicans. About 30 percent
of independent donors were first-time donors. Firsttime donors were not any more or less ideological
1
Unpublished data from a survey reported in Clyde Wilcox et al.,
“With Limits Raised, Who Will Give More? The Impact of BCRA
on Individual Donors,” in Life after Reform: When the Bipartisan
Campaign Reform Act Meets Politics, ed. Michael J. Malbin (Lanham, Md: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003).
than other donors, controlling for the candidate’s party
(i.e. among Bush donors, first-time donors were no
more conservative than past donors; and among Kerry
donors, first-time donors were no more liberal than past
donors). If we compare just Democrats and Republicans,
we find there were more first-time donors among the
Democrats than Republicans. However, if we compared
just Bush and Kerry donors the difference disappears,
suggesting that the other Democratic candidates drew
in more new voters. Our observations here are limited
by the scope of our data, but they nonetheless generally
fit assumptions about the campaign. It appears new
donors were disproportionately independent, but
perhaps in name only. First-time donors are no different
on the liberal-conservative continuum than other
donors who give money to the party’s candidates. The
Democrats candidates who did not win the nomination
attracted new donors to the campaign.2
Demographics
First-time donors were more likely to have been
women, supporting the finding that more women
appeared in our donor survey than past ones. Firsttime donors are also generally younger and earn less
money than people who have given in the past. While
the age difference between first-time donors and other
large donors is significant, first-time donors are hardly
as young as the popular media would suggest. About
half of new donors are over age 50. Finally, first-time
donors are more likely to give online – 74 percent of
large donors (over $500) and 60 percent of small
donors (under $100) who are giving for the first time
did so online.
The Dynamics of Giving for First-time
Donors
First-time donors are usually not on the campaign
prospecting lists, so not surprisingly they are more likely
to say they made a donation without being contacted
by the campaign. Almost half of first-time small donors
decided to give without any sort of contact from the
2
All relationships significant at p < .01 using ANOVA with posthoc comparisons.
SMALL DONORS AND ONLINE GIVING
| FIRST-TIME DONORS | PAGE 39
www.IPDI.org
campaign.
As we saw earlier, direct mail still plays a prominent
role in reaching donors, and that’s true for new donors
as well. However, new donors are disproportionately
being solicited by e-mail. This means that a lot of e-mail
addresses were collected by the campaigns before the
first donation, such as when people submit their e-mail
address in order to get information from the campaign
or to sign an online petition.
Nonetheless, small donors are clearly less likely to
be asked to give money, especially with the personal
requests that are so effective. The donors who have
given before are more likely to get a call from the
campaign, which we should expect, but they are also
more likely to have family, friends or colleagues ask
them for money. For example, only 7 percent of firsttime small donors reported that a friend asked them to
donate, as opposed to 38 percent of large donors who
have given in the past. Regular donors are in a social
network of donors that provides prompting for the next
donation.
As we said earlier, an adage of fundraising is that a
first time donor is a one-time donor. That sentiment is
supported here. First-time donors are less likely to say
they plan to donate or volunteer in 2008. The results
also support the thesis that first-time donors were more
likely to donate because of their attraction to a political
candidate, as opposed to generally wanting to support
the party or get involved in the political process. When
ask if they planned to donate in 2008 “regardless of
who is running,” they were less likely to agree.
Only about 10 percent of first-time donors
volunteered in a presidential election anytime prior to
the 2004 election, compared to about 40 percent of
everyone else. This suggests these donors are being
brought into the political system for the first time, and
it also suggests that for first-time donors the route to
political volunteering lies through donating, and not
vice versa. They did not begin as volunteers and then
graduate into the donor class.
Motivations, Attitudes and Opinions
While first-time donors to John Kerry were motivated
to donate by animosity toward the president, this was
not significantly more than past donors to Kerry. As we
saw in an earlier analysis, being a first-time donor was
not a predictor of making a negative comment about
the opponent. In other words, animosity motivated all
Kerry donors, not just the new ones. Finally, the war
in Iraq and terrorism were not significantly more of a
motivation for first-time Kerry donors.
Table 34
Table 35
Demographic profile of first-time donors and past donors
Percentage of first-time
donors who gave online
Donors who gave $100 or less Donors who gave $500 or more
First-time
All others
First-time
All others
Male
52 %
62 %
46 %
60 %
Female
48 %
38 %
54 %
40 %
Gender
Age
18 to 34
21 %
35 to 50
51 to 65
Over 65
Median Age
4%
3%
26 %
19 %
48 %
26 %
33 %
39 %
38 %
46 %
20 %
39 %
11 %
26 %
51
62
50
58
0%
First-time
donors
Past donors
Donors who
gave $100 or
less
60 %
Donors who
gave $500 or
more
74 %
40 %
52 %
1%
Household Income
Less than $25,000
10 %
7%
2%
$25,000 to $49,999
20 %
22 %
2%
3%
$50,000 to $99,999
38 %
38 %
21 %
15 %
$100,000 to $249,000
28 %
29 %
41 %
41 %
$250,000 to $500,000
4%
4%
16 %
22 %
More than $500,000
0%
1%
19 %
19 %
College degree
Some graduate school
27 %
31 %
13 %
23 %
23 %
11 %
11 %
30 %
10 %
10 %
19 %
10 %
Graduate school
30 %
42 %
49 %
60 %
188
635
73
413
Education
Less than college degree
n
PAGE 40
| FIRST-TIME DONORS | INSTITUTE FOR POLITICS, DEMOCRACY & THE INTERNET
www.IPDI.org
Summary
The polarizing election of 2004 motivated both people
who were giving for the first time and people who had given in
the past. Both new donors and intermittent donors showed
up at the party. It appears that the Democratic candidates
– probably Howard Dean especially – attracted more new
donors. It makes sense that a variety of candidates would
have a broader appeal to the donor pool.
First-time donors are younger and a bit less highly
educated and less wealthy than donors who have given
in the past. The pool of first-time donors is almost half
women, supporting our observation that more women are
entering the donor pool. First-time donors are more likely
than past donors to give online.
They are less likely to have been asked to donate,
especially by friends and family members. And as we would
expect, first-time donors are less committed to returning
as donors or volunteers in 2008.
Thinking about the
presidential candidate to
whom you contributed the
most money, please tell us
why you contributed to this
candidate
Table 36
Percentage who made a negative
comment about the opposing
candidate/party
Bush donors
Kerry donors
First-time donors
Past donors
15 %
45 %
19 %
36 %
Table 37
Percentage who made a positive
comment about the opposing
candidate/party
Bush donors
Kerry donors
First-time donors
Past donors
53 %
40 %
60 %
41 %
Table 38
Percentage who mention integrity,
honesty or strength of their
candidate
Bush donors
Kerry donors
First-time donors
Past donors
21 %
7%
31 %
9%
Table 39
Percentage who mentioned Iraq or
terrorism
Bush donors
Kerry donors
SMALL DONORS AND ONLINE GIVING
First-time donors
Past donors
15 %
11 %
10 %
9%
| FIRST-TIME DONORS | PAGE 41
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PAGE 42
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CONCLUSION
Researchers have known for years that people who
make large donations to a federal candidate come from
a socioeconomic elite. The donor pool is dramatically
wealthier and more highly educated than the general
public. Few people with low incomes or little education
give money, and they do not give much. The major
questions we had were whether the huge upsurge in
the number of small donors and Internet donors in
2004 would alter the picture. It turns out that it does
– somewhat.
Small donors stand somewhere between the pool
of large donors and the general public. They are still
wealthier and more highly educated than the general
public, but substantially less so than large donors. Small
donors are also both older and younger. The average
age of the small donor is older than the average for
large donors, but the small donor pool is made up of
more old and young voters than the traditional pool of
$200-plus donors.
We were also concerned whether small donors and
Internet donors would be more polarized than other
donors. This concern was based on a great deal of
conventional wisdom about what makes for a successful
small donor fundraising appeal through direct mail.
It turns out that the small donors in our sample were
neither angrier nor more polarized than large donors.
They were no more likely than large donors to express
animosity toward the opposing candidate. And while
small donors were a little more conservative on some
social issues, they were not extremists. We find no
evidence to support the fear that larger numbers of
small donors in the political process would somehow
be destabilizing or polarizing.
However, despite the influx of small donors, the bulk
of campaign money continues to come to candidates in
large contributions raised from a socioeconomic elite.
People who typically function in elite circles simply find
it easier to become involved personally and it is easier
for solicitors to find them. Campaign fundraisers are
what political scientists call “rational prospectors.” Like
prospectors for gold, they dig first where they struck
gold before. Finding donors costs money, so campaigns
“prospect” for donors from the lists of old donors. At
the same time, old donors recruit new donors from
their friends and colleagues, who look just like they
do. They go to college, have well-paying jobs and meet
in the same social circles. With a less motivating or
polarizing election in the future, large and small donors
may not appear again in the same numbers as they
did in 2004, but the fundraisers will continue to find it
easier to prospect for the large donors.
As a result, vast segments of the American
population are not well represented among political
donors. It is a gross misstatement to say that their
money is not welcome – candidates will gladly take
their money – but the campaigns have not been looking
for it (or at least not as hard). The costs are too great for
campaign fundraisers with limited resources to spend
much time and money looking for donors among young
people and the less educated. Certainly some people
from these segments of society donate to presidential
campaigns, but the system is stacked against them.
They have little chance to meet a candidate and to
have their picture taken standing alongside. They are
less likely to get phone calls or letters that provide the
critical prompting to donate. And they don’t have the
social pressures from their friends or colleagues.
The question is whether the campaign of 2004
gives us reason to believe this portrait may change.
Certainly, the 2004 election paints a portrait of the
presidential donor pool as more fluid than we used
to believe. Most large donors in 2000 did not return
to donate in 2004, and most donors tell us that they
are, at times, non-donors. People opt in to and out
of politics to a greater degree than we used to think,
depending on their motivations and dispositions for
each election. The number of donors at least tripled
from 2000 to 2004, but the proportion of new donors
was not dramatically higher. That means a lot of old
donors re-entered politics in 2004.
BCRA did permit presidential campaigns to get
those people who gave $1,000 in the last election to
give $2,000 this time, and the national parties and
campaign committees did.1 This is hardly broadening
the donor base. But BCRA and the presidential campaign
laws also led the campaigns and the national parties
1
Congressional committees were generally not as successful. See
Anthony Corrado, “Party Finance in the Wake of BCRA: An Overview,” in The Election after Reform: Money, Politics and the Bipartisan
Campaign Reform Act, ed. Michael J. Malbin (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006 (forthcoming)).
SMALL DONORS AND ONLINE GIVING
| CONCLUSION | PAGE 43
www.IPDI.org
to expand their donor lists. If they hope to compete in
2008 and beyond they will have to continue to prospect
hard for new donors.
The Internet has made it easier to do this. By one
estimate, the cost of raising money online is one-fifth
the cost of raising money by telemarketing or direct
mail. The big money fundraising dinner brings in a lot of
money, but it also costs a lot. This decline in the costs
of finding donors means that it is more worthwhile to
solicit money from e-mail lists of names that in the past
would have been a much less profitable undertaking.
(This suggests how valuable good lists of donors can
be.)
The Internet was influential in leveling the playing
field between small donors and large donors. This
is not due to any single online activity, but rather the
integration of online and offline methods and the
influence of many different online practices on individual
PAGE 44
behavior. The broader patterns of the 2004 campaign
provided the opportunities for these changes. A lot
of fundraising moved online, direct mail and e-mail
appeals grew exponentially and the number of donors
exploded. The Internet then made it easier for small
donors to contact the campaign before being solicited
(and many did). Internet donors were more likely to
forward political e-mail, to ask someone to support
their candidate or to ask someone to donate money.
They more readily would link up with other supporters
at house parties or Meetups. And people who were
online were much more likely to be influential with their
friends and neighbors.
We believe the combination of these forces will be
instrumental in future campaigns, and we hope that
this can help bring to campaign fundraising a richer
social and political diversity that marks the American
political system at its best.
| CONCLUSION | INSTITUTE FOR POLITICS, DEMOCRACY & THE INTERNET
www.IPDI.org
APPENDIX A – METHODOLOGY
The Small Donors Survey was conducted from
July 1 to November 30, 2005. Most potential survey
respondents were first sent a letter telling them that
a mailed survey would be forthcoming in a few days.
Potential respondents then received the survey itself
about a week later. A follow-up reminder card was
sent to those who did not respond about three weeks
after that. Most of those who did not respond received
a second copy of the survey between four and eight
weeks after the initial survey was sent. About 6,477
people were sampled. Of those, 600 surveys were
returned due to incorrect addresses and 17 surveys
were returned because the potential respondent had
died. The total response rate calculated by removing
these surveys from the total mailed was 27 percent.
In each mailing to respondents we included the
address of a Web site where respondents could take
the survey online. Multi-modal surveys have a unique
set of considerations that we needed to take into
account. We encouraged respondents to take the
survey online to reduce the labor costs of inputting
the data from mailed surveys and the postage costs of
surveys returned to the institute via business reply mail.
The online survey was identical in look to the mailed
survey, using identical fonts, sizing and questions per
page. One difference was that respondents online were
unable to determine the length of the survey, whereas
respondents with the paper copy could immediately tell
it was 16 pages. We received several complaints that
the survey was too long from both online and offline
respondents. Nonetheless, we thought the response
online was good and we believe giving respondents the
online option improved the overall response rate. In the
end, 428 valid surveys (or 27 percent of the total) were
received online and 1,153 were received by mail.
Our sample of donors is composed of a random
sample of 3,000 donors who gave more than $200
(large donors) and 3,480 donors who gave less (small
donors). The names of large donors are publicly
available from the FEC and our sample was drawn from
a dataset cleaned and maintained by the Campaign
Finance Institute. The large donors were selected
at random from all donors to the 2004 presidential
campaigns who gave $200 or more. The names of
small donors were drawn from lists of small donors
submitted to the FEC by the six Democratic candidates
and one independent candidate who filed for matching
funds – Wesley Clark, John Edwards, Richard Gephardt,
Joe Lieberman, the Rev. Al Sharpton, Dennis Kucinich
and Ralph Nader. We also obtained a sample of 1,200
names of small donors to President Bush’s campaign
from his Web site. The Bush campaign listed the names
of his donors on the campaign Web site and those
names were collected and collated by the Ray C. Bliss
Institute of Applied Politics at the University of Akron
and supplied to the Institute for Politics, Democracy &
the Internet.
The Small Donors Project also conducted telephone
interviews with 31 donors from June 1 to November
30, 2005, although most of the interviews were
conducted in August. The first four interviews were
used for pretesting the script and contacted through
acquaintances with a snowball sample, so they did
not complete the small donors survey. The remaining
subjects were contacted after they had completed
the survey and indicated a willingness to speak with
a researcher. Subjects were contacted by e-mail and
if they responded affirmatively an effort was made
to reach them by telephone. Most interviews were
between 10 and 20 minutes long. After the first 20
interviews an effort was made to oversample Bush
donors in order to obtain a more representative sample
of donors.
The scope of the interview script generally expanded
as the interviews progressed. It typically began with
basic questions about interest in and involvement with
the campaign and then moved to specific question about
how and why donations to candidates or parties were
made. Several variations on the question script probed
the issue of online donations, campaign volunteering,
opinions toward the campaign finance system and
online media habits. All the interviews were recorded
and then transcribed, amounting to more than 150
pages of transcribed interviews.
Religious Survey data
Data for the religious questions were obtained from
the Pew Research Center. The survey concerning church
attendance was conducted in August 2004 and asked,
“Aside from weddings and funerals, how often do you
attend religious services? More than once a week, once
or twice a month, a few times a year, seldom, or never?”
The question concerning importance of religion in
one’s life was conducted in July 2005 and asked “How
important would you say religion is in your own life?
Very important, fairly important or not very important.”1
Response categories were collapsed to create logical
comparisons across surveys.
Open-ended Question Coding
Three open-ended survey questions were coded.
The first two questions involved why respondents
contributed to a candidate and what prompted their
first contribution. The first question was “Thinking
about the presidential candidate you contributed the
most money to, please tell us why you contributed
to this candidate?” The second question, which
immediately followed the first in the questionnaire, was
“Was there something specific that prompted you to
make your first contribution, such as an advertisement,
1
Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, Religion a
Strength and Weakness for Both Parties [Online report] (30 August
2005 [cited 16 December 2005]); available from www.peoplepress.org/reports.
SMALL DONORS AND ONLINE GIVING
| APPENDICES | PAGE 45
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conversation or news story?”
The response categories were not mutually exclusive.
Responses were compared to the respondents’
voting choice, which we considered their “preferred”
candidate. The categories were:
1. Any mention of the opponent or opposition
party, either explicitly or more implicitly, such
as “the opposing party” or “the opposition.”
2. Any negative mention of the opponent or
opposition party. This requires any mention
such as #1 above, plus any indicator that the
reference is negative or derogatory.
3. Any mention of the preferred candidate or
party.
4. Any positive mention of the preferred candidate
or party.
5. Any mention of the War in Iraq. This would
include the terms Iraq, Afghanistan, terrorism,
or war on Terrorism.
6. Any mention of the following positive values
of the preferred candidate or party: integrity,
values, honesty or strength.
Two coders coded responses and a subset of results
from each coder were re-coded a second time by a third
coder. Those results were then compared for intercoder
reliability.
The third question was simply the open-ended
responses to the question of “occupation” in the
demographic question battery. Responses were typically
limited to one word or a short phrase. They were
coded into four categories: retired, health professions,
legal professions and education professions. These
categories were also not mutually exclusive. Someone
who responded “retired teacher,” for example, would
have been coded as both retired and in an education
profession.
Hierarchical Regression Analyses
For most of the hierarchical regression analysis,
the predictor variables were typically regressed in
the following blocks: (1) age, education, income and a
dummy variable for gender; (2) strength of ideology,
created by combining responses to questions on party
affiliation and conservative-liberal ideology and “folded
over” to make it a strength of ideology scale ranging
from zero to six; (3) variable of zero or 1 for John Kerry
voters; (4) the amount of money the donor contributed;
(5) variable of zero or 1 for first-time donors; and (6)
variable of zero or 1 for online donors.
All statistical tables are available online (www.ipdi.
org) or from the first author.
Predicting negative comments toward an
opponent
The analysis was done by regressing a two-question
PAGE 46
index that measured degree of dislike for the opposing
candidate against the predictor variables. The
dependent variable was created using two questions
at two different points in the survey that both used
five-point response categories from “very important”
to “not at all important.” The first question was “How
important were these issues in making your choice
for president? – I disliked the other candidate” and
the second was “How important were the following
factors in your decision to make a contribution to a
presidential candidate? – The candidate’s opponent
was unacceptable.”
Predicting future donating and volunteering
For this analysis two variables were individually
regressed against the predictor variables mentioned
above. The variables were responses on a five-point
scale ranging from “strongly agree” to “strongly
disagree” to the statements “I plan to donate to the
campaign in the 2008 presidential election” and “I plan
to volunteer for a campaign in the 2008 presidential
election.”
Predicting donor motives
Three indices were created from a battery of
questions asking for respondents’ motivations for
donating. Each question asked respondents to respond
to each statement by marking a five-point scale
ranging from “very important” to “not at all important.”
Questions in each index were determined using a factor
analysis that revealed three significant factors.
The first index of solidary/material motives was
comprised of responses to the statements “The
candidate is friendly to my industry or work,” “I enjoy
the friendships and social contacts,” “The contribution
involved an event I wanted to attend” and “The
candidate will treat my business fairly.” Chronbach’s
alpha for the index was .74. The second index of
purposive motives was comprised of responses to
the statements “candidate’s position on economic
issues,” “candidate’s views on social/moral issues” and
“candidate’s liberalism/conservatism.” Chronbach’s
alpha for the index was .50. The third index of pragmatic
motives was comprised of responses to the statements
“the candidate is likely to win” and “the candidate is
strongest for my party.” Pearson’s correlation coefficient
for the two items was .43 (p < .001).
The predictor variables were the same as above.
Cynicism Index
We composed an index of an individual’s attitudes
toward cynicism with frequently used questions that
address cynicism and political efficacy. We began with
asking respondents to mark a five-point scale from
“strongly agree” to “strongly disagree” for the following
| APPENDICES | INSTITUTE FOR POLITICS, DEMOCRACY & THE INTERNET
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six questions.
1. Politics works for the benefit of special interests
rather than the public good.
2. Most politicians are willing to tackle the real
problems facing America.
3. I generally think that politicians try to do the
right thing.
4. People like me have no say about what
government does.
5. Sometimes politics seems so complex that I
don’t understand what’s going on.
6. Elections make government responsive to the
views of the people.
Often these questions are used to identify two concepts,
efficacy and cynicism. However, a factor analysis did
not reveal a clear division between the two presumed
factors, so five items were combined to form a single
index we identified as general cynicism, leaving out
question #5 above. The remaining questions form a
fairly reliable index (Chronbach’s alpha = .77).
APPENDIX B – VERBATIM
QUESTION WORDING OF THE
SMALL DONORS SURVEY
1. What are your views about the following
statements? (strongly agree, agree, neutral, disagree,
strongly disagree)
a. Taxes should be cut even if it means reducing
public services.
b. People should be able to invest some Social
Security funds.
c. The United States is generally headed in the
right direction.
d. Government should enact laws to restrict gay
marriage.
e. Government should provide health insurance
for the uninsured.
f. Mandatory death penalty for murder should
be the law.
g. I am worried about the national economy in
the next 10 years.
h. Government should spend more to reduce
poverty in the U.S.
i. I worry that my children will not have the
opportunities I had.
2. Who did you vote for in the presidential election on
Nov. 2, 2004?
a. I did not vote.
b. George W. Bush
c. John Kerry
d. Ralph Nader
e.
Another candidate
3. How important were these issues in making
your choice for president? (5-point scale from “very
important” to “not at all important”)
a. Iraq/the war
b. Economy/jobs
c. Terrorism/security
d. Honesty/integrity
e. The direction of the country
f. Strength/leadership
g. Social Security
h. I liked my candidate
i. I disliked the other candidate
4. Generally speaking, do you consider yourself
to be a … (Strong Republican, Independent, Strong
Democrat)
5. Do you consider yourself to be a member of a third
party?
a. No
b. The Reform Party
c. The Independent Party
d. The Green Party
e. The Constitution Party
f. Another third party
6. In the 2004 campaign, did any presidential
candidates ask you for money? If so, how did they
contact you? Check all that apply. If you were not
contacted, just leave blank. (by letter, by phone, by
e-mail, in person)
a. Carol Moseley Braun
b. George W. Bush
c. Wesley Clark
d. Howard Dean
e. John Edwards
f. Dick Gephardt
g. Bob Graham
h. John Kerry
i. Dennis Kucinich
j. Joe Lieberman
k. Ralph Nader
l. Al Sharpton
m. Any others
7. In the 2004 campaign, did any party organizations
ask you for money? Check all that apply. If you were
not contacted, just leave blank. (by letter, by phone, by
e-mail, in person)
a. Republican National Committee
b. Democratic National Committee
c. Republican Senate/House committees
d. Democratic Senate/House committees
8. Generally speaking, how often have you given
money to candidates or political parties? (Never, One
election, Some elections, Most elections)
SMALL DONORS AND ONLINE GIVING
| APPENDICES | PAGE 47
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a.
b.
c.
d.
Presidential candidates
Senate/House candidates
State/local candidates
Political parties
9. During the campaign, did anyone personally ask
you to give money to a candidate or party, either in
person, by phone or by e-mail?
a. I do not recall
b. No
c. Yes
d. (If yes) Who asked you? Check all that apply.
i. A family member
ii. A friend or colleague
iii. A campaign representative
10. Did you ask anyone to give money to a candidate
or political party?
a. I do not recall
b. No
c. Yes
d. (If yes) About how many people did you ask?
i. 1 to 3 people
ii. 4 to 9 people
iii. 10 to 20 people
iv. More than 20 people
e. How did you usually contact them?
i. Talked to in person or by phone
ii. Sent a letter or note by postal mail
iii. Sent e-mail
11. How many contributions did you make to the
following candidates? How much did you give? If you
did not donate, just leave blank.
a. Carol Moseley Braun
b. George W. Bush
c. Wesley Clark
d. Howard Dean
e. John Edwards
f. Dick Gephardt
g. Bob Graham
h. John Kerry
i. Dennis Kucinich
j. Joe Lieberman
k. Ralph Nader
l. Al Sharpton
m. Any others _______
12. How many contributions did you make to the
following organizations? How much did you give? If
you did not donate, just leave blank.
a. Republican National Committee
b. Democratic National Committee
c. Republican Senate/House Committees
d. Democratic Senate/House Committees
13. Was the 2004 election the first time you gave
money to a candidate or political party?
PAGE 48
a.
b.
c.
I do not recall
No
Yes
14. Think back to when you first gave money to a
presidential candidate or political party in the 2004
election. When was that first contribution?
a. I do not recall
b. Prior to Jan. 19, 2004, before any primaries
were held
c. During the primaries, from January to June
2004
d. During the political conventions and debates,
July to October 2004
e. In the last week or so before the Nov. 2
election
15. Thinking about the presidential candidate you
contributed the most money to, please tell us why you
contributed to this candidate? (open-ended)
16. Was there something specific that prompted
you to make your first contribution, such as an
advertisement, conversation or news story? (openended)
17. Did any of the following things prompt you to make
that first contribution? Check all that apply.
a. I received a letter in the mail from my
candidate or party.
b. I received an e-mail from my candidate or
party.
c. I received a telephone call from my candidate
or party.
d. I saw something during the presidential
debates.
e. I saw the candidate in person.
f. I saw a political advertisement on TV.
g. I saw something in the news on TV.
h. I read something in a newspaper or magazine.
i. I saw a political video online.
j. A family member, friend or colleague
encouraged me to contribute.
k. Someone I know told me he or she had made
a contribution.
l. I attended a Meetup.com event or a house
party.
18. How much was your first contribution to a
campaign in 2004? (open ended)
19. Who did you make that first contribution to?
20. How many times were you contacted by a
campaign or political party (such as by phone or mail)
before you made that first contribution?
a. None. I was not contacted.
b. 1 time
| APPENDICES | INSTITUTE FOR POLITICS, DEMOCRACY & THE INTERNET
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c. 2 or 3 times
d. 4 times or more
f.
21. How many of your contributions were made online
using a credit card, debit card, or online check?
a. All
b. Some
c. None
d. (If none) Why not? Check all that apply.
i. I do not have Internet access.
ii. I do not pay for things online.
iii. I do not want to give out personal
information online.
22. How important were the following factors in your
decision to make a contribution to a presidential
candidate? (5-point scale from “very important” to
“not at all important”)
a. The candidate’s liberalism/conservatism
b. Candidate’s position on economic issues
c. Candidate’s views on social/moral issues
d. The candidate is likely to win the election
e. A group I respect supported the candidate
f. The candidate’s opponent is unacceptable
g. The candidate is the strongest for my party
h. The candidate will treat my business fairly
i. The candidate is a good leader
j. As a way to influence government policies
k. I enjoy the friendships and social contacts
l. The contribution involved an event I wanted
to attend
m. The candidate is friendly to my industry or
work
23. When you think about how political campaigns are
paid for, which statement best reflects your view of
the campaign finance system?
a. It is broken and needs to be replaced
b. It has problems and needs to be changed
c. It has some problems but is basically sound
d. It is all right just the way it is and should not
be changed
e. I do not know
24. Generally speaking, do you consider yourself to be
a … (Strong Conservative, Neutral, Strong Liberal)
25. Here is a list of things some people do about
government or politics. Please indicate if you have
done any of these in the past year. Check all that
apply.
a. Written or called any politician at the state,
local or national level
b. Attended a political rally, speech, or organized
protest of any kind
c. Attended a public meeting on town or school
affairs
d. Held or run for political office
e. Served on a committee for some local
g.
h.
i.
j.
k.
l.
organization
Served as an officer for some club or
organization
Signed a petition
Worked for a political party
Made a speech
Written an article for a magazine or
newspaper
Written a letter to the editor to a newspaper
or magazine or called a live radio or TV show
to express an opinion
Been an active member of any group that tries
to influence public policy or government
26. How much do you agree or disagree with these
statements? (strongly agree, agree, neutral, disagree,
strongly disagree)
a. I plan to donate to a campaign in the 2008
presidential election.
b. I plan to donate to a campaign in the 2008
presidential election, regardless of who is
running.
c. I plan to volunteer for a campaign in the 2008
presidential election.
d. Politics works for the benefit of special
interests rather than the public good.
e. Most politicians are willing to tackle the real
problems facing America.
f. I generally think that politicians try to do the
right thing.
g. People like me have no say about what
government does.
h. Sometimes politics seems so complex that I
don’t understand what’s going on.
i. Elections make government responsive to the
views of the people.
27. Do you ever go online to access the Internet or to
get e-mail?
a. No (Skip to the next question.)
b. Yes
c. (If yes) In the past year, did you do any of the
following? Check all that apply.
i. Go anywhere online to get political
information?
ii. Visit the Web site of your political party
or candidate?
iii. Visit the Web site of another party or
candidate?
iv. Visit a political discussion group or chat
room online?
v. Visit a news Web site, such as CNN.
com,
vi. MSNBC.com or NYTimes.com?
vii. Visit a Web log (or blog) that discusses
politics or current events?
28. During the election, how often did you receive
political e-mail?
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| APPENDICES | PAGE 49
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a.
I did not receive any political e-mail (Skip to
the next question.)
b. Several times a month
c. Several times a week
d. Almost every day
e. (If you received e-mail) How often did you
forward political e-mail to someone else?
i. Never
ii. Once in awhile
iii. Sometimes
iv. Often
29. If you worked or volunteered for a candidate in
2004 (such as at fundraisers or rallies), was this the
first time you ever did so?
a. No
b. Yes
c. I did not work or volunteer for a candidate.
30.Including the 2004 campaign, how often have
you worked or volunteered for candidates (such as
at fundraisers or rallies)? (Never, one election, some
elections, most elections)
a. Presidential candidates
b. Congressional or local candidates
31. In the 2004 campaign did you do the following?
Check all that apply.
a. Watch some of the presidential debates?
b. Try to personally convince someone to
support your candidate?
c. Attend a Meetup.com political event?
d. Attend any sort of house party for a
candidate?
e. Put a political bumper sticker on your car or a
political sign in your yard?
32. Thinking about an average weekday, how much
time do you spend … (None, Less than 15 minutes, 1529 minutes, 30-59 minutes, One hour or more)
a. Reading a daily newspaper
b. Watching the news on TV
c. Listening to news on the radio
d. Reading news on the Internet
e. Reading magazines
33. How have you been getting most of your national
and international news?
a. Newspapers
b. Television
c. Radio
d. Internet
e. Magazines
f. None of the above
36. Race/ethnicity
a. White
b. Black
c. Hispanic
d. Asian
e. Native American
f. Other
37. State of residence
38. How often do you attend religious services?
a. More than once a week
b. Once a week
c. Several times a month
d. Seldom or never
39. Overall, how important is your religious faith in
your life?
a. Very important
b. Important
c. Somewhat important
d. Not very important
e. Not at all important
40.
What is the highest level of education you
have attained?
a. Less than high school
b. High school diploma
c. Some college
d. College degree
e. Some graduate school
f. Graduate degree
41. What is your marital status?
a. Married
b. Separated
c. Never married
d. Widow/Widower
e. Divorced
42.Occupation
43.Annual household income
a. Less than $25,000
b. $25,000 - $49,999
c. $50,000 - $74,999
d. $75,000 - $99,999
e. $100,000 - $149,999
f. $150,000 - $199,999
g. $200,000 - $249,999
h. $250,000 - $499,999
i. More than $500,000
34.Age
35. Gender
PAGE 50
| APPENDICES | INSTITUTE FOR POLITICS, DEMOCRACY & THE INTERNET
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| SOURCES | INSTITUTE FOR POLITICS, DEMOCRACY & THE INTERNET
www.IPDI.org
SMALL DONORS AND ONLINE GIVING
| SOURCES | PAGE 53
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