Democrats Should Try a Netflix model.

Photo by Oscar Vargas on Unsplash

Imagine what the Democratic Party could do if it could create a regular stream of donations that freed staff from some of the heavy burden of fundraising and freed regular donors from the relentless barrage of solicitations. Sound impossible? Consider this.

Roughly half of all American Households have a Netflix subscription https://www.statista.com/statistics/483112/netflix-subscribers/. The average cost of a subscription is at least $10 a month (some pay 7$ and see ads, and some pay $15 for ad free). Netflix in this way brings in about $ 9,000,000,000 a year. All told Americans probably spend roughly $ 30,000,000,000 a year on streaming television services. So the model is already working outside of politics.

Yet a barrier remains because political parties can’t imagine enough folks signing up for reliable donations. After all, a prevailing sentiment is that there’s already too much money in politics. But that’s because people don’t expect their political donations to provide them with any direct benefit. And in our current model that’s mostly true.

Right now campaign funds go primarily to advertising with what seems like a side effort spent on getting people to knock on the doors of primarily strangers. Tellingly these efforts aren’t even spread across the entire country. Instead expenditures are concentrated on a rotating basis within swing states and competitive races. This means that for upwards of 75% of the country, politics can feel like it is something that happens for other people.

We can change this, and we already know there is fertile ground to do so because millions are invested in the Democratic cause. Roughly 15 million people voted in the 2024 Democratic primary process despite it being non-competitive. These 15 million people, along with probably an additional 2 or so million who donated to a Democratic candidate but did not vote in this primary, constitute a large universe of people who care enough that they would be reasonable targets for signing up for a Netflix like services for the Democratic Party. From a revenue perspective getting 10 million people to sign up for $ 10 a month, would be about 1.2 Billion dollars annually.

That is a lot of money on which to run a party. The only way this works however is if the Party begins to offer services that make joining worth it. For starters, by joining, members should be able to eliminate fundraising solicitation from Democratic organizations and candidates. What other services are available depends a lot on location and a lot on what we think people want. For instance, there is absolutely no reason the Democratic Party could not run some gyms or film festivals. Join the party, get access to the gym or free movie tickets. Already there are an incredible number of Substacks that are subscribed to and paid for. Perhaps those authors could take a larger upfront payment to make their content available for any party member. The possibilities are nearly endless, and it seems important to ask what people would want before just instantly offering things. It is true that the cost of providing the services will take away from some of the Party’s working capital. But it is also the case that as more is offered more people might be convinced to join the party and thus provide a broader revenue base.

Another approach is that some donors can be offered higher value perks and thus they might end up buying more expensive memberships. That potential adds a wider range of options.

There are no doubt lots of legal, cultural and status quo reasons why the subscriber model had not been done. But the bottom line is that getting people to invest on a permanent basis is a much better plan than getting people to respond on an emotional basis to a barrage of urgent appeals many of which are over the top and some downright untrue. Almost all state parties and the like have begun to try and gather recurring donors. But they have done so without really offering anything in return. If we begin to offer tangible benefits to donors, that will dramatically increase the appeal of a Netflix-like program. This is without a doubt a massive undertaking, but it is the exactly sort of creative thinking that we need from the party in order to be successful in the long term.