As we head into 2020, one of the most-watched and hard-fought races is going to be the race for Kentucky’s seat in the U.S. Senate. Will Mitch McConnell win again, or will a challenger finally help him retire, gracefully or no?
We all know of McConnell’s prowess when it comes to raising money. At the moment, though, one Dem challenger is hot on his heels in the fund-raising department: Amy McGrath.
McGrath made a big splash when she entered the race, and money poured in from all over the country. So, we had some questions about how her campaign finance reports compared to those of McConnell. Specifically, we wondered:
- Where are they each getting the most contributions from individuals?
- What are the average size of those contribution from individuals?
- And, what is the difference in fund-raising from entities other than individuals (PACs, organizations, and so on)?
In this analysis, we’ll look at three areas:
- McGrath’s contributions from individuals
- McConnell’s contributions from individuals
- How they compare on contributions from PACs and organizations
Note that all the numbers in this analysis come from their 2019 reports with the Federal Election Commission (FEC.gov). Also note that we are only looking at itemized contributions, because those are the ones that are broken out by individual contribution.
Amy McGrath’s donations from individuals
McGrath has had a strong fund-raising year, and would be in good shape against almost anyone besides McConnell. But even compared to Mitch, she is definitely holding her own. She has received 8,146 contributions from individuals (about 1,500 more than McConnell), for a total of $3,597,561 (about $1M less than McConnell). Her average donation from individuals, then, is about $440.
Here are two charts showing how many contributions and how many dollars have come from each state this year for McGrath:
In order to make the rest of the graph readable, we cut off part of the bar for California. McGrath actually had over 1,800 donations from California, which was about 22% of her 8,000+ individual donations.
Kentucky was fourth in terms of number of donors at 452, with an average donation of about $300.
Here is a chart showing total dollars raised from each state this year:
Again, in order to make the rest of the graph readable, we had to cut off the bar for California. McGrath has raised about $930,000 so far this year from California. Kentucky is the fifth-highest state in terms of total dollars raised so far this year.
Mitch McConnell’s donations from individuals
In order to make the reports somewhat comparable, we only used receipts from 2019 for both candidates. McConnell, of course, has been raising money for much longer than that.
In comparison to McGrath, the basic story for McConnell is less donations from individuals, but each donation was bigger. McConnell had 6,755 donations from individuals totaling $4,621,109, for an average donation of $684. His donations from Kentucky were also larger than McGrath’s, at an average of $594.
Right off the bat, you’ll notice that Kentucky has the second-highest number of contributors to McConnell, almost as many as California.
And, even though Kentucky is fourth in total dollars raised from individual donations, there is not a great difference from the states ahead of it.
An initial conclusion that isn’t the whole story
Any person looking at these four charts in isolation would conclude that McConnell seems to have more support within the state, and McGrath is keeping up by reaching out nationally.
There is no doubt that this is a race with national attention, and McGrath’s early announcement on the heels of her popular 2018 campaign fired up persons all across the country who are more than ready to see McConnell defeated. It would be easy to point to the individual contributions from California versus Kentucky, and draw the erroneous conclusion that McGrath is favored by west-coast liberals and McConnell is very popular in his home state.
The more likely truth is that Democrats in Kentucky were spending their meager dollars on Beshear and the other state-level candidates, and weren’t going to donate to McGrath or any federal candidate till after the November election. As for McConnell, his individual donations came largely from persons who have the means to max out to him AND to state candidates.
We reached out to the McGrath campaign for comment on their fund-raising record, and spokesperson Terry Sebastian shared this statement:
Amy received donations from all 120 Kentucky counties in her first quarter with an average of $36 per donation. She did this despite holding no in-state fundraisers during the governor’s race so Kentuckians could fully support Andy Beshear. She went a step further and transferred $200,000 to the state party to fully fund its get-out-the-vote efforts for the governor’s race.
As I said, it’s easy to talk about where McGrath got a good chunk of her money. And as Sebastian points out, she intentionally didn’t work Kentucky during the governor’s race.
A more important point, though, is to look at the other source of funds for campaigns: PACs and other organizations. In other words, NON-individual contributions.
McConnell, McGrath, and PAC money
It’s all well and good to dig into donations from individuals and try to determine what they mean. In the case of the McConnell-vs-McGrath story, though, there is another much more important space to look at: gifts from PACs and other organizations.
The difference between Mitch McConnell and Amy McGrath is this space is so dramatic that you wonder if the numbers are right. I assure you they are. And remember, this is just for this year.
You are reading that chart correctly: for 2019, McGrath has received 86 non-individual donations, while McConnell has received 2,553.
And here’s the difference in the amount of money each has received from those non-individual donations:
McConnell has received, just this year, $170,958,054 in donations from PACs, organizations, and committees, while McGrath has received $9,694,164.
Some closing thoughts
Obviously, the large number and amount of donations from California for McGrath will be something the McConnell campaign will be glad to harp on. (Of course, they would have said the same thing no matter what the numbers were, since “California liberal” is one of their main campaign cliches.)
McGrath can certainly respond by pointing out the thousands of PAC donations from Virginia and New Jersey, and the millions upon millions flowing into the McConnell campaign from PACs and corporations. “Mitch for sale to the highest bidder” is an easy conclusion to draw from the two graphs above.
Any Dem wanting to run against McGrath is going to have to figure out how to close the fund-raising gap. It’s interesting to note, though, that while she’s gotten about 450 donations from Kentucky this year, the Beshear campaign got many times that number of donations from Kentucky in the run to the governor’s seat. So, even though Kentucky is certainly not California in terms of political fund-raising, it is still possible to raise money and enthusiasm from the grass-roots.
And that, perhaps, is the biggest conclusion to draw from both these reports and from the election just past. Matt Bevin out-raised Andy Beshear, but still lost. Amy McGrath can’t touch McConnell when it comes to PAC money – but she has many more individual donations, each of which represents a voter.
You’re not going to be able to out-PAC Mitch McConnell. Whomever the candidate is against McConnell, Kentucky Democrats and progressives are going to have to draw thousands of new donors into the mix. The combination of grass-roots fund-raising and grass-roots organizing is the only way to beat McConnell.
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