Judging candidates by their coffers

When it comes to congressional campaigns, conventional wisdom dictates that cash is king. The more donations candidates accumulate, the more they can spend on staff, ads, flyers, buses, and more.

Jaclyn Kettler, political science professor at Boise State University, studied the relationship between congressional candidates and fundraising and found that the conventional wisdom does not always hold up.

“We look at the 2022 House races, top fundraising races, and then the most competitive races. And they don’t match up, which is really fascinating,” Kettler told WORLD. She’s publishing a book on her findings called The Roads to Congress 2022. “Wouldn’t we expect all the top fundraising races to be the competitive ones? Well, actually no,” Kettler said.

The amount an individual candidate raises often paints an incomplete picture of the competitiveness of a congressional race. While fundraising draws media attention, experts like Kettler warn that it often says more about the overall political process than about the state of a particular contest.

But fundraising as a metric is not meaningless, either. Money donated to individual campaigns from party fundraising committees such as the Congressional Leadership Fund, VoteBlue, ActRed and others can signal how much confidence party leaders have in a particular candidate or whether that seat has potential to determine control of a chamber.

“They would not be giving anything if they did not think the candidates were credible enough to be part of an elite set of recipients,” Donald Green, professor of political science at Columbia University, told WORLD.

Green studies voting behavior, partisanship, media effects, campaign finance, and the ways in which political campaigns mobilize voters.

He explained that political hopefuls can prove their viability to leadership by starting their fundraising operations on their own, demonstrating that they’re worth further investment.

“If the candidate is visible, well organized, and passes the sniff test—and has some fundraising momentum—you think ‘well, they’re taking this seriously and they are credible down the stretch,’” Green said.

But after a certain threshold, the importance of how much a candidate raises eventually goes down, even in races with lopsided war chests.

“Any candidate who hasn’t raised $100,000 in a close district isn’t taking the charge seriously,” Green said. “On the other hand, $5 million to $2 million is different. Both candidates are viable, they’re doing their best to raise resources, they probably have ample resources to run credible campaigns. It may be that for whatever reason, one candidate has access to more.”

In this year’s race for Colorado’s 8th Congressional District, Republican challenger Gabe Evans has raised just $1.03 million, less than a third of the $4.5 million raised by incumbent Rep. Yadira Caraveo. But polling from this week suggests the race is dead even.

How much a candidate is able to raise outside of their political infrastructure can also say a lot about individual donor interests.

“Types of donors have different priorities,” said Kettler, the professor from Boise. “We find in our research, for example, businesses are much more interested in supporting incumbents, for example, because access is more important [to them]. Individuals might be much more concerned about ideology, those types of things. So, we argue that different sources of money have different goals.”

In extremely partisan environments, that can result in lopsided funds going to races that aren’t remotely close. In 2022, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., raised an impressive $12.5 million from a national donor base for a race she eventually won by over 30 percentage points in a district that voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump in 2020.

“Some individual donors may be so driven by this idea of ‘negative partisanship’ or the dislike of the opposing party, that you’re sending money to candidates that first of all may not even be your district and also may not be competitive at all,” Kettler said.

WORLD evaluated this year’s 70 most competitive races for the House of Representatives as determined by the Cook Political Report, a nonpartisan elections evaluation service.

Distribution of Republican candidate fundraising in 2024’s 70 most competitive House races for incumbents, challengers Graphic by Leo Briceno/Sources: Cook Political Report, Federal Election Commission

In terms of donations made directly to candidates, this year’s top five Republican fundraisers in districts labeled competitive by the Cook Report are in Montana, California, and New York. Combined, the donations add up to $30.94 million. The candidate with the most direct donations is Ryan Zinke, R-Mont., at $6.79 million, according to Federal Election Commission records.

The top five Democratic races are in Alaska, Virginia, Washington, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania. Rep. Mary Peltola, D-Alaska, has raked in $7.54 million to her campaign. Combined, these candidates have raised $37.71 million.

Of these 10 races, the Cook Political Report designated six of them as toss-ups. (This evaluation excludes funds spent on behalf of candidates like commercial advertising funded by super political action committees.)

Distribution of Democratic candidate fundraising in 2024’s 70 most competitive House races for incumbents, challengers Graphic by Leo Briceno/Sources: Cook Political Report, Federal Election Commission

Kettler pointed out that there are plenty of examples of campaign fundraising underscoring the surprising momentum of an underdog. On the other hand, there are races that acted as a red herring for candidates who looked stronger on FEC reports than at the polls.

“I do think that we can learn important things from candidate fundraising and spending. With a candidate like [U.S. Sen.] Bernie Sanders, it was kind of an early sign of like ‘oh his campaign may be more competitive than what we initially thought,’” Kettler said, referring to Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign in which the self-proclaimed democratic socialist nearly captured the Democratic nomination.

Amy McGrath, a former Democratic Senate candidate, amassed a stunning $96.33 million in an unsuccessful bid to unseat Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., in 2020. McGrath lost by 19 percentage points.

“But to use McGrath [for] example, she was able to fundraise a huge amount of money. Maybe that was not as informative of her level of competition,” Kettler added.

Green, the professor from Columbia, believes voters should be wary of donations as a tool in political commentary and media to attempt to pre-determine winners and losers.

“It’s part of the horse race coverage,” Green said. “But it shouldn’t be conflated with direct measures of public opinion.”