The Democratic Debate Donor Requirements are Dumb

JACOB DENNINGER: In 2016, powered by small-dollar grassroots donors, Bernie Sanders gave Hillary Clinton a run for her money in the Democratic presidential primary. Two years later in the 2018 midterms, Democratic candidates raised tons of money through small-dollar grassroots donations on their way to taking back control of the House of Representatives.

The Democratic National Committee (DNC) acknowledged the importance of these small-dollar grassroots donors when they included a donor requirement in their debate qualification criteria for the 2020 Democratic presidential primary debates. This donor requirement was a well-intentioned idea, but it hasn’t worked as intended, and the DNC should get rid of it.

The DNC’s donor requirement set a threshold for the number of unique donors each candidate needed to qualify for the primary debates. That threshold started at 65,000 unique donors for the first debate in June and has gradually increased to 165,000 unique donors for the upcoming debate on November 20.

The donor threshold was a good idea in theory. It was supposed to ensure that there was grassroots enthusiasm for each candidate on the debate stage among small-dollar donors, who have become an increasingly important source of funding for Democrats. If a Democratic presidential candidate couldn’t get enough donors to meet the DNC’s threshold, that would theoretically indicate that the candidate had a weakness with these important small-dollar donors.

But the donor requirement hasn’t worked at all. It has simply distorted incentives in the primary, encouraging counterproductive tactics as candidates go to great lengths to meet the debate donor requirements.

See, all of the Presidential campaigns believe that being in the debates is absolutely crucial national exposure that is necessary to remain competitive in the race. Struggling campaigns are therefore willing to do anything to get enough donors to reach the donor threshold, including spending $60 on Facebook ads to get a $1 donation, as Montana Governor Steve Bullock has done. 

That is just a bad campaign strategy. In the absence of the debate donor requirement, no campaign would be stupid enough spend $60 to get a $1 donation. It would make just as much sense to flush $59 down the toilet. But the debate donor requirement has shifted incentives in the campaign. It has made getting a $1 donation more important than getting votes in early states.

This shift in incentives only encourages counterproductive tactics that make struggling campaigns even weaker as they waste money trying to get tiny donations when they should be using their money to hire staff and run ads in early states like Iowa and New Hampshire. These are the things that actually help candidates get votes. It’s votes—not $1 donations—that actually win primaries.

The donor requirement ends up not being a good measure of a candidate’s overall strength, grassroots appeal, or fundraising ability because candidates are willing to do counterproductive things they wouldn’t otherwise do in order to meet the donor threshold. It makes no sense to have a requirement like this that doesn’t measure what it is supposed to and incentivizes bad campaign strategy. The DNC should get rid of the debate donor requirement for the rest of this primary process, and they should never impose it again in future campaigns.

Jacob Denninger is a sophomore in the College from Massachusetts majoring in Government and a staff writer for On the Record. He is also a Deputy Director of Campaigning for the Georgetown University College Democrats, and he campaigned for several Democratic General Assembly candidates in Virginia in 2019.