McCain Fundraising: A Call to Arms

As much as I don’t want to sound unhelpful, it’s time for a little tough love. If anyone thinks McCain raising $15 million in March is good news — and crucially, just $4M of it from online and direct mail — then they’re probably part of the problem rather than part of the solution.

What stands out from the announcement is the sense that they’ve thrown in the towel when it comes to fundraising for John McCain 2008. Read between the lines, and it sure looks like they’re putting all their chips on RNC Victory, which can raise in $25,000 increments, and a helping hand from Team Romney. They’re also taking public money in the general, foreclosing any chance of the grassroots funding the campaign if Obama breaks his public funding promise.

The campaign is on track to meet its internal budget goal of about $57M through the start of the Republican convention and an additional $20M for a legal compliance fund.

McCain’s fundraising team has also been tasked with raising about $100m into the Republican National Committee’s Victory Fund, which will be spent in the fall. The campaign itself has stopped raising money for the general election and intends to accept the $85m from the federal government.

The campaign expects a fundraising boost in may from the efforts of ex-MA Gov. Mitt Romney, who has pledged to raise at least $15m for McCain by encouraging his donors to contribute.

This suggests that they not only expect to lose the fundraising race, but intend to go down without a fight. How? By relying on the same weakened high-dollar model that fell short for every Republican candidate in the primary, and barely bothering with the untapped potential of the Internet that John McCain first discovered in 2000, and has enabled every candidate who has used it well to exceed expectations.

There is something noble about running an ascetic campaign. About winning with less. If anyone can do it, John McCain can. In fact, that’s how he did it in the primary, and the story of how he won with virtually nothing in the bank is nothing short of inspiring for campaign professionals. When all the mercenary $2,300 donors left the ship, his low-dollar base stuck with him, providing him with just enough of a cushion to bounce back.

No low-dollar donors, no McCain as the nominee.

The problem now is that with a national campaign, McCain needs many more donors of all stripes to pull it off. One can win a primary on fumes, but can one win a general election that way?

McCain needs both the fat cats and little guys behind him – but low-dollar is more elastic and scales better. Instead, the focus has all been on high-dollar. Thirty to forty percent of the candidate’s time is spent at high dollar events, rather than meeting voters. All the background quotes given to reporters suggest an elaborate event-driven fundraising strategy and a great deal of time, thought, and organization poured into an incrementalist and labor-intensive strategy of prying loose that next $2,300 check.

Why are we not talking about the urgency of minimizing the online gap with Obama at a similarly high level? Isn’t it one of the central strategic challenges facing the campaign and the party?

The good news is that all this attention to offline means that McCain is probably outraising Obama through events. But that doesn’t do much good when we’re getting killed 10-to-1 online and Obama doesn’t need to spend any time doing events.  

I get that this is not apples to apples. The Democrats are in the midst of a nomination fight. Obama is more personally inspiring, etc. etc. But this doesn’t relieve the tremendous burden that we face as a party to get this right. We need an Apollo program to make the Internet the engine of Republican campaigns in the 21st century. I don’t intend to spend the next fifteen years explaining how we failed to seize upon the Internet as a transformative medium in the same way that Democrats failed with direct mail and grassroots activism in the ’70s and ’80s.

We can make all the excuses we want. The Democrats will always be portrayed the beneficiaries of a perfect storm, no matter what we do. In 2003, they were portrayed as doing better online because they were penniless and the underdog. In 2008, when we are penniless and the underdog, Democrats are winning online because they’re ascendant. Figure that. In 2004, John Kerry was supposed to win on the backs of millions of landline-chucking young voters who didn’t get polled.

The Democrats and the media will always try to psych us out by saying it’s not our time, that all the energy is on their side. (Look how they duped the smart Beltway money into thinking 2008 would be another wave, holding back Republican recruitment and triggering a flood of retirements.) It doesn’t matter how many polls say John McCain is winning in states like Pennsylvania and Oregon, just as the grassroots army the Bush campaign built in 2004 didn’t matter… until Election Day.

Maybe we won’t win in absolute terms. But there is nobility in trying. In throwing the kitchen sink at the problem. In closing the gap as much as is humanly possible, so that those who come after can build it even better.

This is not a criticism of the team working on this. One need only look at their aggressive use of online advertising to gauge their technical proficiency. I’ve highlighted the smart and refreshing way they reach out to swing voters to tell the McCain story.

The problem is that no one in the high command seriously believes that the online campaign can be as big and strategically important as Finance, or Political, or Communications. The McCain campaign needs to start by giving the eCampaign the same operational leeway in scheduling the candidate as the other divisions have — even if it’s just two minutes a day for an authentic McCain video blog that breaks news and creates value. They need to be given the authority to rewrite the rules, with real-time fundraising transparency that lays bare the urgency of the situation and gives the grassroots what they need to ride to the rescue. Grassroots empowerment must be made a central ethos of the campaign.

Bunding reached its zenith in 2004, and it truly was a sight to behold at its peak. But it’s past time to start working on what comes next.

FOR MORE: Read Sean Hackbarth.

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