“The biggest beneficiaries of rising small-dollar donations are often rabble-rousing politicians who vow to take on the Washington establishment”

That’s a line from this Reuters story, which shows that the cut-off in corporate contributions to candidates who objected to the electoral vote count has been more than offset by the increase in small donations. From 2008-2018, the Democrats had dominated small-donor fundraising, because their allies moved first to build an effective infrastructure. But Republicans are now catching up. Here are a few details from the story:

Right after the deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, dozens of U.S. companies announced they would halt political donations to the 147 Republican lawmakers who voted to overturn Donald Trump’s presidential election loss. Two months later, there is little sign that the corporate revolt has done any real damage to Republican fundraising.

If anything, the biggest backers of Trump’s false election-fraud narrative – such as Missouri Senator Josh Hawley and Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene – have been rewarded with a flood of grassroots donations, more than offsetting the loss of corporate money. And contributions from both small donors and rich individuals looking to fight the Democratic agenda have poured into the party’s fundraising apparatus. …

Hawley, the Missouri senator, was pilloried by Republicans and Democrats for leading the coalition of Senate objectors. He took in $969,000 in donations in January, according to a Feb. 1 memo posted on his website. That is eight times some $120,000 in donations Hawley raised in the first quarter of 2020, regulatory filings show.

The corporate PACs that have stopped donating “account for a VERY small percentage of total fundraising that is more than offset by a huge surge in grassroots support,” Hawley’s pollster, Wes Anderson, wrote in the memo.

Greene – the freshman congresswoman who has come under fire for promoting baseless conspiracy theories – said in Twitter posts that she had netted $335,000 in contributions on Feb. 2 and 3 alone. On Feb. 4, the House of Representatives voted to strip Greene of two committee assignments over her remarks, including those in which she advocated violence against Democrats.

“UNREAL! $175,000!!” Greene said in one Twitter post….

The brisk fundraising since the insurrection indicates that most Republican voters are “comfortable” with the party that has been remade in Trump’s mold, says J. Miles Coleman, a nonpartisan analyst at the University of Virginia Center for Politics.

“The Republican Party – it’s not going to go back to the party it was before Trump,” he said.

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