If you want to defeat Trump in 2020, I’d argue one of the worst things you can do right now is donate to Democratic presidential candidates. I’m serious.
Bear with me.
Last time I checked, Democrats have something like two dozen candidates in the race. That means any given donor’s chances of picking the winning candidate who ultimately runs against Trump are poor. Therefore, the contribution you give today could be, for the purposes of defeating Trump, pretty much wasted.
But what if you really feel strongly about a candidate?
Look, the policy differences between most of the candidates are not very significant. The differences get artificially magnified in heated primaries, but let’s keep things in the proper perspective. If you feel strongly about Issue X, the odds are very good that you are going to have several candidates in the race who agree with you, if not all of them.
So, donating now won’t particularly help promote Issue X. That’s why it’s very difficult to pick a Democratic candidate deserving of your donation.
Finally, making a contribution to an individual candidate now could inadvertently prolong the portion of the campaign season where Democrats have so many candidates in the race that their message is pretty much incoherent. Candidate winnowing is particularly needed with a field of 24, because a crowded, contentious field muddles the eventual nominee’s message and probably muddies the nominee’s reputation.
Candidates typically leave the race when they run out of money to pay for staff and ads, so giving to candidates now could simply delay the badly needed winnowing phase of the campaign.
So, which candidate or candidates should get your contributions? None of them.
Instead of contributing to one of the Democratic presidential candidates at a stage of the process when the race is essentially a roulette wheel, direct your contributions to Unify, Or Die.
Unify, Or Die was started by the hosts of the excellent podcast Pod Save America, in partnership with Swing Left. The idea simple and brilliant. People who want to defeat Trump can Donate to the Unify, Or Die Fund now, and the minute there is a Democratic Party nominee, all of the accumulated funding immediately will go to the Democratic nominee, so they can hit the ground running post-Democratic Convention against Trump and his massive war chest
So before you write that next big Hickenlooper check, stop, think big picture strategy, and redirect your money to a unified movement to remove the most corrupt, incompetent, and bigoted President of our times.
This makes total sense; thank you for your insight.
While certainly pragmatic, this feels just too cynical to me. I would vote for a road-kill groundhog over Trump, but if you believe in the party system, why undermine it or even lay the groundwork for its demise? Doesn’t starving primary candidates of $ mean that only the long-established or self-funded (i.e. millionaire/billionaire) candidates survive long enough to become the nominee? What about the process wherein someone new captures the collective imagination, generates excitement (and donations) and rises to the top? By working through this process we can get a candidate whose ideas and character we actually believe in—someone better than Trump AND the dead groundhog.
Fair points, Monica (and “hi,” it’s been forever!). I suspect I’m the outlier amongst my friends on this one.
For the reasons you state here, I gave teeny contributions to two candidates (Harris and Booker), who are very unlikely to win, but I’d love it if they caught on. For the reasons I state in the post, I’m giving much more (monthly contributions from here to General Election Day) to Unify, Or Die, to hedge my long-shot bets.
If I thought that there was one candidate in this field who was far and away or better than the others, or one strong contender who was extremely dangerous (like a Trump), I couldn’t go for this. But in a mega-crowded field of strong progressive candidates who all would be light years better than Trump, I just can’t see sinking most of my contributions into long-odds primary election speculation that likely won’t impact the General election outcome.
I’m sure most will see this differently, and want to give to a candidate(s) now. Because I can live with the any of these folks being the nominee, I want to spend most of my money helping the nominee at the stage she or he needs it most to beat Trump. I worry that too many are going to get tapped out financially, or substantially so, during the primary portion of the campaign and we’ll be low on gas to stop Trump during the crucial summer and fall months.
And if folks don’t want to contribute to Unify, Or Die instead of a candidate(s), maybe consider contributing to the Fund in addition to contributing to a candidate(s)?
Thanks for dropping by. Hope you’re well!