ActBlues

The near-collapse of NGP VAN, Democrats' non-strategy, the fall of 538, trust in institutions, the true House popular vote, views of foreign aid, ChatGPT Tyler Cowen, the young liberal LGBTQ majority

No. 352 | March 5th, 2025

🔵 The Democrats

The rise of Internet fundraising has driven the Democratic Party to the left, complicating efforts to moderate in national elections and leaving behind its former working class nonwhite base.

Here is the paper that demonstrates this.

Over the previous two decades, campaign contributions from small donors to congressional elections have surged, and new technologies have transformed the process of political fundraising. How does money from small donors change how legislators take positions and behave in Congress? ActBlue is a digital platform that has lowered the non-monetary costs of individual contributions and has processed billions of dollars in donations for Democratic candidates and causes. Using a difference-in-differences design based on staggered ActBlue adoption by House candidates, I find that when candidates join ActBlue, they raise more money from individual donors. This is predominantly driven by growth in small-donor contributions. The source of contributions to these candidates shifts to the ideological left. Those elected to Congress vote more with the median Democratic legislator and less with the median Republican legislator, and see their interest group ratings shift leftward, on average. These findings suggest that pursuit of small and individual donors contributes to congressional polarization.

Meanwhile, things aren’t going so well over at ActBlue.

Nor are they going well in other parts of the left’s tech ecosystem: NGP VAN nearly failed last fall.

Problems with a huge database of voter information that effectively functions as the central nervous system of the Democratic Party grew so worrisome last summer that top Democrats staged an extraordinary intervention to keep it running through the November election, according to multiple people involved.

Had it collapsed, the party’s entire get-out-the-vote operation could have been temporarily crippled, forcing canvassers to work with pen and paper instead of smartphones, and leaving campaigns effectively blind — unaware of which doors to knock on and which phones to call.

Blueprint Polling reveals 40% of Democrats say the party has no strategy against Trump. 24% say it has a bad strategy.

📰 Data Journalism

538 is no more.

Nate Silver eulogizes the site he founded.

538 was unfortunately never the same after Silver left. It still employed some good analysts and produced quality products like its pollster ratings, but the writing was on the wall after publishing a questionable presidential forecast showing a toss-up race even after Biden’s disastrous debate performance and pre-dropout. And then it took far longer than other models for it to come back online after the candidate switch, this time showing a forecast more in line with consensus estimates. The change was never explained, likely at the behest of ABC executives, but the original model was heavily criticized for its reliance on “fundamentals” over polling that late in the election cycle, a decision that conveniently favored the Democratic candidate both in 2020 and 2024.

Hopefully Silver can get the brand name back and rebuild it on Substack.

📊 Public Opinion

Silver also steps into the breach with the Silver Bulletin Trump approval tracker.

Same story as ever: steady decline in trust of institutions. And it really takes shape in 2004-05. That’s right around the George W. Bush second term doldrums and the rise of partisan online media.

KFF’s health tracking poll does a deep dive tracking poll does a deep dive on foreign ad programs.

Operational liberalism, symbolic conservatism: Tom Wood plots support for increased government spending on specific programs, even as the public says it wants lower spending overall.

🇺🇲 2024

Split Ticket calculates the true 2024 House popular vote, taking into account uncontested races. It was R+2.2, a very similar margin to 2022 and historically close to the presidential margin.

The Maryland voters who switched to support Larry Hogan in the Senate race after backing Kamala Harris were likelier to be Democrats, moderates, white, and college-educated.

🇺🇲 2026

Opposition party incumbents are historically safe in midterms.

😂 Humor

Quality ChatGPT response:

🌎 Global

Aggregating European election results for the last 100 years shows the rise of the hard right.

👫 Demographics

54% of very liberal young people describe themselves as LGBTQ, while only 7% of conservative young people do. American Storylines asks what’s behind this.