Part of this article is caused by the photos. I tried to delete the photos so you could read the print. However, that didn't work so the best solution likely would be to click on word button two lines down to read whole article: begin quote from:
Democrats made a bet on Trump that just paid off — bigly
byAlex Seitz-Wald
WASHINGTON — With two weeks to spare, the
Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has already raised twice as
much money online this year as it did in 2015, officials said.
Online donors gave $40.46 million in 2017 as
of Thursday morning, easily outperforming the $19.7 million raised
online two years ago, the most recent non-presidential election year.
Many liberal and Democratic groups have seen a flood of donations since Trump's election. But the DCCC,
whose apocalyptic fundraising emails reporters and political operatives
love to hate, gave NBC News a rare look inside the mechanics of
monetizing the Trump backlash.
Majority of Americans prefer Dems in Congress: poll
6:59
A few days after the election, Julia Ager, the
DCCC's digital director, and her team tentatively dipped their toes
into the new uncharted political waters with a simple email asking
supporters to sign a petition "to hold Republicans accountable."
In the rhetoric of Trump-era politics, the ask could not have been more generic.
Online fundraising has become a billion-dollar
business in politics with reams of data to inform every little move.
But like everyone else, Ager's crew had no idea how dispirited Democrats
would react to Hillary Clinton's shocking defeat. So they watched and
waited for the results.
"It immediately became clear from that email there'd be unprecedented engagement," Ager said.
Campaign committees often go deep into debt
during an election and typically look to cut costs and layoff staff
afterward. The DCCC was no exception, facing roughly $14 million in
outstanding obligations.
But armed with the data from the early tests,
Ager asked the committee's new executive director, Dan Sena, and its
chairman, Rep. Ben Ray Lujan, D-N.M., to take the peculiar step of
spending millions of dollars upfront to build their email fundraising
list in the hopes it would pay dividends later.
They approved the gamble, and the first ads
went online a week after the election. By the end of March, the group
had spent $2.5 million on email acquisition.
But a year later, the owners of those new
email addresses have contributed $6.7 million and counting. Overall, the
group has seen 256,585 new donors this year.
"It paid off massively," Ager said. "We took a
bold strategy right after the election, and we feel this early
investment is why we've been so successful."
To try to win the 24 seats Democrats need to
retake the House next year, they're competing in more than 90 GOP-held
districts, which will require lots of money.
Midterm elections typically don't excite the liberal base like presidential ones, but Trump has changed that.
Overall, including traditional giving, the
DCCC raised $89 million as of the end of October, the most recent
numbers available.
The House Republicans' campaign arm brought in
$77 million over the same time, which is still strong for an off year,
though they've been outraised in recent months. They have not released
online fundraising details.
The DCCC's fundraising success is hardly an
outlier for Democrats and left-leaning interest groups. But it shows
once again that Trump, while bad for Democrats' policy agenda, has been
good for their campaign coffers.
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