Democrats Crushing GOP in Fundraising

Cash. (CC0 Creative Commons).

It was back in 2015 that Republican legislators pushed a campaign finance bill that Democrats opposed and then-Governor Scott Walker signed. Among the provisions was one ending the $10,000 limit for individual donations to a political party. While there were still limits on how much you could donate to candidates, donors now could simply give any amount — the sky’s the limit — to a political party and the party could give it to candidates.

“It’s unlimited! This is madness!” said then-state Sen. Janet Bewley (D-Ashland), objecting to the provision.

Besides opening the floodgates to unlimited donations, complained good government advocates like Jay Heck of Common Cause in Wisconsin, it will turn legislators into sheep who must follow the party leaders in order to get campaign donations. “The legislative leaders will be able to discourage independent stands or even thoughts by individual legislators,” Heck warned.

But Republicans were convinced the change would give them a big advantage in campaigns, and for a while it did. By 2018, three years after the law was passed the state Republican Party raised $17 million, compared to $8 million by the Wisconsin Democratic Party as the Badger Project reported, based on data from the nonpartisan Wisconsin Democracy Campaign (WDC). But by 2020 the numbers were nearly reversed, with the Democratic Party raising $27 million compared to $16 million for Republicans and in 2022, Democrats won again by about $22 million to $16 million.

But that was only a warmup for 2023: Last year the Democratic Party buried the Republican Party, as a recent report by the WDC found. Campaign finance reports for the last half of 2023 showed the Democratic Party raised $16.14 million for the entire year, compared to just $3.95 million raised by the state Republican Party. That’s a more than 4-to-1 edge for the Democrats, including contributions to the state parties from individuals, political action committees, candidate committees and corporations.

The total money raised by the two parties, just over $20 million, was about 10 times more than the two parties combined raised in 2014, about $2 million. This was one year before the $10,000 limit for a donation was ended. But the best example of how wide the floodgates had been opened to wealthy donors is the top contribution to the state Democratic Party last year: California billionaire Reid Hoffman, Microsoft board member and co-founder of LinkedIn, gave the party $3,580,000, or 3,580 times more money that he could have under the state’s old limit of $10,000.

Both parties had contributions from such billionaires last year. For the Republicans that included Diane Hendricks, owner of ABC Supply, who contributed $945,000 and Elizabeth Uihlein who donated $500,000. Elizabeth and her husband Dick own the Uline company and have been huge Republican donors over the years.

But the Democrats raked in far more donations in 2023 from fat cats who were past donors. Ranking second after Hoffman was Illinois billionaire J.B. Pritzker, the governor of Illinois, who donated $1,100,000; New York billionaire, philanthropist and frequent right-wing punching bag George Soros, who contributed $1,000,000; Oklahoma billionaires Lynn and Stacy Schusterman, founders of the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies, who both donated $500,000; and mere millionaires Kenneth James Duda of California, founder of Arista Networks, who gave $290,000; and Milwaukee philanthropist Lynde Uihlein, probably the least wealthy on this list, who gave $450,000. All seven on this list were also top donors to the state Democratic Party in 2022, while Lynde Uihlein has been a big donor to the party for decades.

And let’s not leave out Hollywood film director Steven Spielberg and his wife Kate Capshaw, best known for her starring role in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, which her husband directed. They gave $150,000 each to the state Democratic Party last year, after having jointly contributed some $200,000 in 2022 to the state party and various Democratic candidates.

You can expect this rise in donations to parties in Wisconsin to continue climbing, so long as the law allows unlimited donations.

But how is that Democrats are doing so much better getting such donations? Looking at the far bigger list of billionaire donors to Wisconsin’s Democratic Party, you might think the wealthy in American lean to the left. In fact, data shows the nation’s billionaires are more likely to back Republican and conservative political candidates, by a three-to-two ratio in 2022. Certainly Walker and Republicans assumed they would get the lion’s share of fat cat donations, which is why they passed the 2015 law allowing unlimited donations.

What explains the Democrats’ huge edge? Republican Party Chairman Brian Schimming has called state Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler a “master” at raising cash from out-of-state donors, as Urban Milwaukee has reported. But he’s also vowed to catch up.

A more important factor may be that many wealthy Republicans prefer the anonymity of donating to secretive dark money groups, or may not trust the party structure and prefer to run their own third party advocacy group where they control the spending. We saw that in the state Supreme Court race where the campaign of liberal Janet Protasiewicz buried the campaign of conservative Dan Kelly in spending on TV ads, by about $9 million to almost nothing. All the spending for Kelly was done by third party groups: the super PAC Fair Courts America, backed by Dick Uihlein, spent $2.3 million on TV ads and $450,000 on radio advertising, and the state’s biggest business lobby, Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce, spent $3.4 million on Kelly.

But that money had far less impact per dollar spent because a candidate’s campaign pays far less for TV ads than third-party groups, which are typically charged three times more. So that’s another advantage for Democrats.

Of course the campaign spending arms race never ends and can always change from year to year. But eight years after Walker and Republicans passed their campaign finance law, the results point to an old maxim they might have heeded: be careful what you wish for.