• by Michael Cornfield , Op-Ed Contributor, April 15, 2014

Billionaire donors are getting a lot of attention these days, but small donors, conventionally defined as citizens who give to a campaign beneath the Federal Election Commission reporting threshold of $200, matter increasingly as well. Small donors provide campaigns with grassroots legitimacy and sometimes significant amounts of money, especially in states and cities that match small donations with public funds, in ratios as high as 6:1.

Before the second Clinton-Bush presidential hand-off in 2000 and the 2002 enactment of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, Republicans dominated the small donor market, principally via direct mail and narrowcast appeals to conservative values, which work to this day. While W. was president, Obama and the Democrats gained the upper hand, partly by pooling knowledge obtained through digital media and advances in data analytics. The 2014 campaign season will build on this see-saw history and operate in a wilder environment, thanks to deregulatory rulings issued principally by the Roberts-era Supreme Court. 

So how should candidates market to small donors today?

We have launched the Shenkman Initiative on Applying Big Data for Political Success to identify winning strategies and practices. At a Shenkman Seminar last month, BYU professor David Magleby, a meticulous scholar of campaign communications, presented highlights from a big study he is completing with colleagues Jay Goodliffe and Joseph Olsen. They surveyed a sample of small donors to the McCain and Obama campaigns of 2008 and the Obama and Romney campaigns of 2012, including re-contacts of Obama 2008 donors in 2012. Their findings point to a trinity of key factors: political marketing to small donors has to work the Net, offer a compelling message, and present the candidate attractively. 

The importance of the messenger’s persona wins support from the cognitive psychology literature. We are prone to rely on character judgments as substitutes for policy judgments. That is, instead of taking the time and effort to figure out where we stand on an issue based on the facts and options, and where the candidates stand based on their records, we go with our sense (often partisan-filtered) of who projects a good profile through the messages we encounter. Because we prefer such civic shortcuts, campaign appeals for dollars often hinge on the perceived personal appeal of the intended beneficiary.

The persona factor also counts big because, as potent as it may be as rhetorical content, a fund-seeking message alone won’t stand out on an American campaign playing field made national by digital media. Look at it this way: if each and every Republican candidate is going to run against Obamacare in 2014, then each and every one of them will need a distinguishing feature to get Republicans to give them money. The same goes for Democrats running on raising the minimum wage. Relying on one’s constituents for contributions won’t cut it in close high-dollar contests. Thus, the successful small donor fundraiser candidate must not only espouse a cause, she must be the cause. The unique selling proposition flows from an individual’s display of passion for a signature issue position that she has fought for throughout her career. The life story exemplifies both the political problem and solution. 

My restatement of Magleby’s medium/message/messenger argument could be put to an experimental test. Suppose you pay attention to politics, making you a good donor prospect. You are exposed to several versions of a candidate ad. The first comes from Americans for a Free America, which means you’ll think it’s either a front group for oligarchs or a Stephen Colbert spoof. The second comes from 6,284 people like you, which means you’ll think it’s from an ideological group that relies on grassroots support because it lacks big money. The third comes from a politician whose name you nod at approvingly because he or she said something recently that caught your attention as a fresh take on an issue you care about.

I think you are most likely to respond favorably to a fourth, all-of-the-above option. Year in and year out, people give to candidates who “share their concerns,” offer “common sense solutions,” keep those banal phrases to a minimum, and brandish support from rich and small donors, doubly confirming their appeal. 

And all of that information can be processed at a glance, which is all the time fundraisers get in most circumstances.