Half a decade ago, in 2019, Republicans unveiled WinRed — a fundraising platform designed to compete with the Democratic ActBlue and facilitate small donations. The WinRed rollout was aggressively promoted by the Republican National Committee (RNC), which was led by Ronna Romney McDaniel at the time and is now operated by Chairman Michael Whatley and Co-Chair Lara Trump.
But in 2024, with Donald Trump having secured the GOP presential nomination for the third time, Republicans have a fundraising problem. Although countless polls are showing a close presidential race, President Joe Biden and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) have a major fundraising advantage.
According to RealClearPolitics' Susan Crabtree, some Republican consultants and strategists are sounding the alarm and warning that the GOP needs to seriously ramp up its fundraising. And some of them believe that WinRed hasn't made good on its promises from five years ago.
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"In its first year of operation, WinRed and Trump's combined efforts had a good track record," Crabtree explains in an article published on April 11. "Trump, for instance, amassed $626.6 million from small-dollar donors, 35 percent more than Joe Biden did during the 2020 cycle. So far in the 2024 campaign, however, Trump can't count on such a significant small-dollar advantage to make up for Democrats' overall grassroots fundraising advantage."
The reporter adds, "Last year, he raised just $51 million from small donors — less than half what he raised in 2019. Meanwhile, ActBlue collected $959,627,475, nearly a billion dollars, in small increments through the end of February, compared to WinRed's $430,965,507 as of December of last year, the latest federal election records available."
Former Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-Georgia), according to Crabtree, is pushing DonateRight — a conservative donation platform meant to compete with WinRed. And she hopes the GOP will fire up its small-donor efforts.
Loeffler told RealClearPolitics, "We're driving donors away…. We have campaigns across the country that need a trusted, secure, feature-rich, low-cost fundraising platform, and it's not being offered."
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A Republican digital strategist, interviewed on condition of anonymity, is also frustrated with GOP fundraising.
The strategist told RealClearPolitics, "The challenge is just the right has yet to match the intensity and depth of giving on the left. Most people who begrudge it are the same people who stifle innovation by limiting dollars that go into things like prospecting and finding new donors and continue to only run traditional television at the end."
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Read Susan Crabtree's full report for RealClearPolitics at this link.
