Q1 Republican fundraising hauls revealed

GOP digital fundraising platform WinRed brought in nearly $130 million for Republicans in first quarter of 2020, nearly doubling its fundraising from the final quarter of 2019. Yahoo Finance’s Kristin Myers joins Zack Guzman to discuss.

Video Transcript

ZACK GUZMAN: We do have more numbers regarding what happened in the economy in Q1. And one of the closely watched elements of the year so far has been political donations. You might have forgotten we've got an election this year with all the news going on, but our own Kristin Myers has been digging into donations specifically on the Republican front. And Kristin, it doesn't look like donations have been slowing down that much.

KRISTIN MYERS: Yeah, no, Zack, they actually haven't, really. So for Q1, these are numbers from WinRed, which is essentially the Republican answer to ActBlue, which is this really dynamic fundraising platform. So on WinRed for Q1, they were actually able-- they were able to pull in about $130 million for the first quarter, 129.6 million to be exact.

Now I just want to remind everyone that, obviously, Q1, January through March, so this does include some donations before the whole coronavirus really hit in full force. But it does also include the whole month of March. So obviously, those donations were not slowing down at all.

Now the average donation size was roughly $40. And one million donors gave on average 3.2 times. So they were giving repeatedly.

Now I want to mention here something really interesting from these numbers. 29 million of the 130 million that was raised in the first quarter was actually monthly recurring, which is a fairly low number. That means $100 million were from donors that did not have this recurring donation cycle set up, and they constantly kept giving money even as coronavirus and all the fears about what it was going to do to the economy, do to people's jobs, do to people's salaries. Despite that, people continued to give money.

Now I just want to put that 130 million in context. Because back in Q4 2019, just the most recent quarter, they were a 70 million. So almost 100% jump there. And in the quarter before that, $31 million were raised, so that was the first quarter that WinRed actually had a full quarter of fundraising. So they are constantly picking up steam here.

Now I want to put this in context, however, to what the Democrats are doing. We don't have their Q1 totals just yet. But in Q4, right, while WinRed was raising 70 million, ActBlue raised 343 million. And for the total year of 2019, the Democrats on ActBlue were actually able to raise a billion dollars across the whole year.

So Democrats, at least when it comes to those small dollar donors, still able to do a much better job than those Republicans. But obviously, this is not something Republicans-- and I actually asked WinRed, hey, did you guys see a slowdown in the donations? And they said there was a small decline, but not to the extent that they were expecting.

Now the president is not fundraising off the back of coronavirus, which is the first time we've seen him not use a crisis to make some money. But we're going to have to see in the coming weeks, months the next couple of quarters if people actually decide, hey, we got to save our pennies, save our dollars for our own bills and our own emergencies, instead of giving them over to campaigns.

ZACK GUZMAN: Yeah, the Impeachment Defense Fund a little bit different, I guess, than the coronavirus.

KRISTIN MYERS: There was a lot of money on that impeachment defense fund.

ZACK GUZMAN: They did.

KRISTIN MYERS: Republicans were [INAUDIBLE] actually, you know what, we might be able to get some more donations because people are, you know, approving of the way that the president is handling this crisis. So that might pad his coffers. We're just going to have to see if those fundraising numbers take a nosedive.

He raised $46 million in the last quarter, so we're going to have to see how those numbers stack up for Q1. We don't have his camp-- we don't have the Trump campaign's numbers just yet either.

ZACK GUZMAN: All right, there you go, the latest update from Kristin Myers, digging into all the fundraising data, as usual.