Americans Love “Small-Dollar Donors.” There’s a Major Dark Side.

America loves the grassroots—at least a popularized idea of it. From Norman Rockwell paintings of town-hall meetings to letter-writing campaigns to Congress, the country is big on celebrating humble citizens who exercise their rights. (Look no further than the thinly veiled corporate lobbying shops pushing to extend a tax loophole that drape themselves in phony grassroots names like “Americans for a More Everyday America” for a little stolen valor.)

And what could be more grassroots than a small political donation? The vision of an average American chipping in five or 10 bucks for a candidate they really believe in has entranced Democrats and Republicans for years. On the left, those small-dollar donations are thought to help offset the influence of billionaire donors and special interests, while the right sees them as an army of everyday Americans who are banding together to fight back against liberal celebrities, allegedly woke corporations, and labor unions.

This year, the Republican National Committee even began requiring presidential candidates to get a minimum number of small donations to qualify for its primary debates.

But what if small-dollar donors are … making things worse?

Recent events and political science research indicate that people who make small donations are more ideologically extreme, that they seem to reward politicians who violate democratic norms, and that they may be undermining the ability of political parties to rein in their most problematic members. For now, this appears to be more of an issue for Republicans, but there’s no reason to think Democrats will remain immune to these effects.

Look closely at who’s getting the most money from small donors, and the picture becomes clear.

For the left, it’s going to progressive stalwarts such as Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, all of whom get more than half of their donations from small donors, according to data collected by Open Secrets. But the top Republicans are more of a rogues’ gallery of troublemakers than some ideologically coherent group: Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, and Jim Jordan all lead the way. And in the GOP primary, Donald Trump absolutely dominates among small donors.

In recent years, it’s become exceedingly easy to make these kinds of political donations, thanks to behind-the-scenes software powered by ActBlue (for Democrats) and WinRed (for Republicans). You get an email in your inbox with the latest outrage—either real or imagined—about some politician you can’t stand, click a button, and immediately their opponent has $20. This kind of small-dollar donating has the emotional appeal of a scratch-off lottery ticket, except instead of you winning, there’s a chance that someone you hate will lose.

Eric Wilson, executive director of the Center for Campaign Innovation, which trains conservatives on how to use online campaign tools, says that small-dollar donors are sort of like “voters-plus.” They’re more engaged, more active politically, and more likely to be following political news on social media. As a result, small-dollar donors fit into a classic horseshoe shape, with more engagement at both ends of the political spectrum and a broad, flat middle that’s not giving. Nobody’s getting fired up and donating $5 over centrist dealmaking.

Small donors are driven by newsmaking events, as one recent study showed. ActBlue processed more than $20 million for pro-choice candidates and causes on the day the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.

But in the absence of real news, a political stunt will do. The template was set in 2009, when South Carolina Rep. Joe Wilson impulsively shouted “You lie!” during President Obama’s State of the Union address. He was formally rebuked by the House for the breach of decorum but raised more than $200,000 by the following day. Wilson’s outburst was organic, but today a lot of Republican lawmakers basically try to create those kinds of moments in order to raise money off them.

Think of almost anything that has made you worry a little about the health of our republic in the past few years, and odds are, a Republican involved hauled in a bunch of small donations over it. Multiple members of Congress voting to reject the results of the 2020 election? Former President Donald Trump indicted? The embarrassing multiple rounds of votes to confirm Kevin McCarthy as speaker of the House—and, later, to replace him? All were big moments when the GOP’s small donors opened their wallets.

But like any addiction, it gets harder to deliver those little dopamine hits to keep people giving. For Republicans, that’s meant embracing ever more extreme ideas and tactics, which bleed over into governing.

Political science professor Lindsey Cormack maintains DCinbox, a database of all the official emails sent by members of Congress. Written by congressional staffers, the official emails are supposed to be straightforward messages to constituents: “Here’s what you need to know about that highway project just outside town” or “Congratulations to these local 4-H volunteers.” But Cormack is starting to see the inflammatory rhetoric often reserved for fundraising emails—phrases like “Biden crime family” or “IRS army”—regularly appear in constituent emails. And the fundraising emails are going even further, with references to stories covered almost exclusively in far-right outlets like One America News that often have a tenuous connection to reality, much less to their actual constituents.

Not long ago, I received an urgent fundraising email from the North Carolina Republican Party asking for help fighting back against liberal attempts to “erase Mount Rushmore from our history books.” You know, the Mount Rushmore that’s a 26-hour drive from the North Carolina capital.

You can literally see the difference between the tone of the two parties’ emails. As an experiment, Cormack started feeding the top keywords each day from constituent emails sent by Democratic and Republican members of Congress into A.I. art generator Midjourney and posting them on Instagram. The Democratic images are almost comically generic: a train running through a field, college kids walking through campus, a veteran with his wife and daughter. But many of the Republican images are unhinged: Biden holding a machine gun in front of a mosque or standing in front of columns of flames, or the U.S. Capitol exploding.

It’s possible that small donors are getting fatigued by all this end-times rhetoric. A Politico analysis over the summer found that small-dollar donations were down for both Biden’s reelection campaign and the Republican and Democratic committees dedicated to winning back the House, after years of shooting upward. Some blame inflation. Others attribute it to the relative calm of the past year, with Republicans managing to stave off a shutdown, no competitive Democratic presidential primary, and a GOP primary that’s long been predetermined.

But if the flood of money from small donors dries up because politics is too boring, then the politicians who depend on it are going to do everything they can to make things more exciting. Next year’s presidential election should help juice the numbers for a little while. But after that, we may be back to more election denial, shutdown threats, speaker battles, and impeachment inquiries. It’s almost enough to make you long for a corporate lobbyist who just wants a tax loophole extended.