Republicans launch fundraising effort that's supposed to compete with ActBlue — but a website can't fix the GOP's culture problems

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24 June 2019

After a delay of 15 years, Republicans finally launched the site that’s supposed to level the playing field with progressive fundraising powerhouse ActBlue, only … it’s really just a landing page. There’s no directory of candidates, no ability to sign up for an account, no way to create a fundraising page, nothing. Just an animated GIF and a contact form. As of Monday at noon, its Twitter account hadn’t even tweeted.

WinRed (Donald Trump named it himself and tweeted a link to its lone functional page) has a long, long way to go to catch up with the $3.5 billion-with-a-b raised through ActBlue since its founding in June of 2004, and there’s good reason to doubt it ever will. For starters, there’s the grifty fee structure: While ActBlue charges a flat 3.95% per contribution, WinRed takes a 3.8% cut plus 30 cents per transaction.

That might not sound like a big difference, but it’s huge. On a $5 contribution, ActBlue will net 20 cents. WinRed, however, will take 49 cents, which in percentage terms is a giant 9.8%. What’s more, on a contribution page that lists multiple campaigns, it sounds like WinRed will get 30 cents per donation. (From the site itself: “There is a 3.8% + 30 cents per transaction fee with each donation made.”) In other words, if you split $25 across five candidates, that’s a cool $2.45 for WinRed. ActBlue would take less than a buck.

These high fees will make Republican campaigns want to look elsewhere, but the real obstacle for WinRed isn’t uptake from the consulting class. Republicans have long imagined that what they have is a technology problem — “Build a better website and we can take on ActBlue” — but what they really have is a culture problem.

ActBlue was created by and for the grassroots, in response to newfound progressive energy that exploded online during the Bush era. WinRed, by contrast, came about because billionaire megadonor Sheldon Adelson threatened to cut off the GOP if it didn’t play digital catch-up with the Democrats.

And it shows: Nowhere on WinRed’s whisper of a site is there any mention of the power of small-dollar donors. ActBlue, by contrast, proudly advertises its “tools to harness the power of the grassroots” in giant type right at the top of its home page.

And that’s really it right there. The progressive moment wants to give grassroots activists the tools to engage independently and make a difference. Conservative elites, by contrast, spend every day praying they can tamp down their lunatic base. Empowering their own grassroots is something they’ve never been interested in and have in fact actively resisted.

So sure, you can create a new website with every fancy donation tool you’ve ever dreamed up — not that WinRed is any such thing. But what you really need is people. And given the long history of failed ActBlue clones, the GOP’s ability to get actual human beings to adopt its new platform en masse is something we should all be skeptical of.