It turns out Bernie Sanders was wrong about one thing: You can’t buy a revolution for 27 dollars a donor (or “TWENTY SEVEN DOLLAHS!” as Sanders would ritually shout at his rallies, adding, “This in itself is revolutionary”). The Bern himself appeared to acknowledge that truth last week when, in an effort to keep his movement going long after Hillary Clinton had beaten him, he made campaign manager Jeff Weaver head of his new organization, “Our Revolution,” and Weaver promptly sought to dip into the very same tainted well Sanders had campaigned against all year long: big money.
In response, Sanders was blindsided by a walkout of more than half of group’s disenchanted staff. “Jeff [Weaver] would like to take big money from rich people including billionaires and spend it on ads,” departing staffer Claire Sandberg told POLITICO last week, “That’s the opposite of what this campaign and this movement are supposed to be about.”
Yet the irony is that only by adopting a policy that undercuts one of the main tenets of his movement can Bernie Sanders keep that movement alive. It’s easy to knock Sanders and Weaver for hypocrisy, but in fact they should be praised for waking up to this harsh reality: The Sanders revolution can’t survive without a lot more money that his passionate but shallow-pocketed followers simply don’t have.
Last week’s installation of Weaver as Our Revolution president rankled the younger staff who accused him of, among other things, putting a heavy emphasis on television advertising at the expense of bottom-up movement building during the primary.
Weaver has been unapologetic about cultivating major donors for Our Revolution, while trying to assure supporters he won’t exploit the rule that would allow the 501(c)(4) group to keep those donors secret, telling The Atlantic this week that the new organization “will have a policy to disclose larger donations.”
Still, the new campaign seems a departure from the purity of the old. After the polls closed in the last primary state of California, Sanders declared, “we showed the world that we could run a strong national campaign without being dependent on the big-money interests whose greed has done so much to damage our country.”
But even then, Sanders’ campaign-ending boast would have gotten only a “half-true” from the professional fact-checkers. He is correct that he ran a “a strong national campaign ”based on small donations. ” He raised $231 million from 2.7 million donors (the average donor gave a total of $86, not $27) which is about what Hillary Clinton raised if you don’t count her Super PAC. Most importantly, he outspent her by about $26 million. He didn’t lose because of money.
But Sanders’ broader implication—that his victories in more than 20 states means soliciting major donors is no longer necessary to win, and his revolution can triumph without their money—was not at all proven.
If Sanders tried to win the presidency with small donors alone, and he faced a Republican nominee not named Donald Trump, he likely would have been severely outgunned. In 2012, the Barack Obama and Mitt Romney campaigns, including outside expenditures, spent more than $1 billion each. It is hardly a given that Sanders, or anyone else for that matter, could come close to that figure with small donors alone.
And Our Revolution isn’t talking about winning the presidency. It’s talking about winning races up and down the ballot, from senator to school board, coast to coast. That’s not going to be done on the cheap either. In the 2014 midterms, nearly $4 billion was spent by congressional candidates and their allies.
Another group looking to transform Congress led by former Sanders’ volunteers, though not one endorsed by the Vermonter, is a PAC called Brand New Congress. With an audacious goal of trying to completely transform the makeup of the House, the organizers are trying to recruit candidates for 2018 who support the Sanders’ platform, “running candidates in the Democratic and Republican primaries” in nearly every House district and then, in a move designed to give Establishment Democrats the vapors, “running independents where we lose.”
Brand New Congress suggests it will be funded by small donors alone: “We simply ask supporters on our website to pitch in if they can.” However, an Alternet account of a recent organizing call reported that so far the effort has attracted “8,000 small donors raising $40,000.” That’s about 0.00004 percent of what was spent in 2014. Granted, it’s pretty early to be talking about 2018, but for the beginning of an electoral revolution, that’s not exactly a shot heard ‘round the world.
Why is it so much harder to raise small donations for supporters of Sanders’ platform than it was for Sanders? Because the small-donor model only works, to the extent it works at all, on behalf of individual charismatic candidates. People can get caught up in the excitement of a Sanders, an Obama or an Elizabeth Warren. But any electoral revolution will involve hundreds of boring candidates desperately trying to grab a wisp of attention in a clickbait world. They need reliable funding streams, and without a hearty band of committed wealthy donors, an easily distracted army of armchair warriors won’t provide enough cash.
Sanders and Weaver don’t deserve condemnation for altering their strategy. Where they should be faulted is their previous conflation of the progressive agenda with their campaign finance strategy, giving many of his followers a warped and simplistic view of how politics works. Building a campaign or a movement based on a foundation of donors small and big doesn’t mean the big donors call all the shots; it only means compromises will be required to satisfy all elements of the coalition.
The cry of “27 dollars” was not only the campaign’s claim to moral superiority over Hillary Clinton. It was also integral to the campaign’s argument that progressive policies could not advance without purifying how politicians fund campaigns. But that argument flies in the face of history.
Clinton at times rebutted Sanders by citing Obama’s record-breaking Wall Street haul in 2008 (surpassed by Romney four years later). That didn’t impress hard-core Sandernistas, who considered Obama more “neoliberal” than liberal. But left unmentioned in the campaign by either candidate was how Sanders’ presidential idols, Franklin Roosevelt and Teddy Roosevelt, fared in the campaign money chase.
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Even way back then TR and FDR, like Bernie, had to make some adjustments.
Nearly a quarter of FDR’s donations in the 1932 election came from Wall Street, while Teddy Roosevelt took hundreds of thousands from the oligarchical “captains of industry” in his 1904 campaign. (Teddy batted back the charge from his conservative Democratic opponent Alton Parker that he was taking part in corporate “blackmail,” though the contributions came back to haunt him late in his losing 1912 campaign. He was forced to give Senate testimony about it, prompting one newspaper to shout, “Wall Street Favored Roosevelt, Admits Monster 1904 Slush Fund.”)
In turn, Teddy Roosevelt compromised with the railroad interests when enacting one of the first major regulatory acts. The Hepburn Act gave an executive branch commission the ability to put a ceiling on railroad rates, but gave the conservative judiciary broad power to review. “What we want to know is why you surrendered,” a progressive journalist said to him at the time, but no one would dare call TR a corporatist today. He is properly credited with building the first block of the modern regulatory state.
FDR similarly broke bread with Wall Street representatives when establishing the Securities and Exchange Commission, eschewing a progressive push for rigid rules on financial institutions in favor of giving the commission regulatory flexibility. He too was accused of selling out to Wall Street then, a criticism that sounds ludicrous today.
Progressive presidents have long been buffeted in their campaign by a combination of small and big donors—the percentage of Obama’s total fund-raising from small donors in 2008 roughly equaled Woodrow Wilson’s in 1912—but then once in office, they found a way to navigate the pressures from those disparate constituencies and secure significant legislative victories. Sanders didn’t teach that nuanced history in his populist campaign, and now it is coming back to haunt him, with many his supporters viewing any large check as inherently corrupting.
“What all of our supporters were so excited about, that we were taking a country back from the billionaire class without the use of billionaire money, $27 at a time,” Claire Sandberg, the defecting Sanders supporter, told Democracy Now. But if some of those billionaires want to help provide free college educations, expand Social Security, establish a living wage and avert a climate crisis, that’s worth getting excited about too. It is also, practically speaking, the only way to get it all done.