The Democratic Party Should Formally Take Over ActBlue.

Photo by Rod Long on Unsplash

The Democratic Party Should Formally Take Over ActBlue.

The latest shock rippling through the Democratic Party ecosystem comes from this disturbing story in the New York Times about ActBlue https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/05/us/politics/actblue-democrat-fundraising-resignations.html. No one should doubt ActBlue’s absolutely essential role in our Party’s infrastructure. But we should not forget that ActBlue’s pre-eminence arose somewhat accidentally. It now needs much greater controls.

Let’s start by recognizing what role ActBlue plays in the infrastructure. ActBlue is a store, but it has none of its own products. The Democratic candidates, and to a lesser extent Democratically-aligned groups are all that it sells. Without the consent of those entities, it would have nothing to sell and would shut down in less than a month. This is obviously a big gun to bring to the discussion, but it is also the truth. ActBlue is such a powerhouse because of two main things and could be even more powerful if we harness an untapped third thing.

First, ActBlue’s nearly 15 million saved credit cards and its one-click donation feature make it an incumbent of deep power. Starting from scratch to replicate such an easy-to-use database would be exceedingly difficult. Building a copycat wouldn’t be impossible but to a large degree being first at something gives you a significant first mover advantage as the default site for those who signed up early. Consider how Netflix still has a large number of subscribers not only because its content library remains powerful, but because people stick with the original default even as they add others.

Second, all things considered, ActBlue remains a very easy giving process, even if one is not one of the express donors. They have figured out how a donation can be made in compliance with a great number of state and federal regulatory bodies and this makes the process simple for donors. This is how they ended up winning in the first place, and since they charge about a 4% processing fee, they are able to continue accumulating a large resource pool off of which to work (They are also wonderfully transparent with how much they raise in real time.)

The third area in which ActBlue’s power lies is that when it comes to political goods they know who buys what, when and how. This is an underutilized aspect of their strength. Consider how similar knowledge makes Amazon so powerful. They know what, when and how you buy a broad range of goods, and so they are more likely to recommend to you products that you actually want. ActBlue has similar data and could potentially figure out what might make donors want to give more. Even more ambitiously, they could potentially figure out who is buying arguably inferior political products and move donors toward a better valued product.

ActBlue also knows clearly who is a mid-sized donor versus who is a small donor. If in an election cycle you give less than $100, we absolutely want you to give and the money you give is important to the ecosystem. But there are almost certainly a large number of donors whose individual gifts are small donations, but because they contribute to a wide number of candidates or groups their donations in aggregate amount to $250, $ 500, even $ 1000 over a given cycle. Currently these donors dole gifts out either in response to an emotional reaction to stimuli or because they know someone who asked them to give. There are other giving patterns of course but those are the two primary ways. With a better understanding of the data you could in theory put such donors in touch with a “political concierge” whose job it was to help them make smarter, better and then ultimately larger choices. But the pairing of donor with concierge can only happen if the matchmaker knows which donors are cumulatively doling out larger amounts. Matchmaking might be one benefit of gaining control of the platform, but admittedly this would come only later as processes change.

The problem at the moment is that ActBlue is our Party’s store, and to a very large degree people assume that what is sold at the store must be good because otherwise it wouldn’t be allowed on the shelves. However, ActBlue does not consider itself to be the Store but just a marketplace where buyer and seller meet. And that’s where the trouble starts. ActBlue is the custodian of the credit card information, yet they rely almost entirely on the FEC for most levels of policing. And as we know, even before its further neutering by the Trump Administration, the FEC is really not able to regulate anything. That means, unbeknownst to our donors, there are a number of junk products on the shelves at ActBlue, and, even if some of the products are not junk, the way they are sold is clearly terrible. I have been digging into who the bad actors are, how they work and what can be done to get rid of them. I will be publishing more on this. But the bottom line is that ActBlue should be able to pull shoddy products from the shelves instantly and then prevent the people who sold them from simply putting a new name on the same product and bringing it back to the store. ActBlue should also have some idea of how the products sold at the store are being advertised.

The problem hits some places in the ecosystem harder than others. For small scale sellers, say those who raise less than $ 50,000 on the platform, such controls are barely needed because people who are small time don’t need much monitoring. Likewise, actual candidates have considerable incentives to avoid over the top bad things because they almost all rely on a mix of large donors and small donors and in theory could be attacked if their fundraising was less than on the level. This is counterintuitive, but groups that rely on some combination of large and small donors are likely to be better and more responsive then those funded by small donors alone. For big outside groups, the incentives are wildly different particularly if such groups only answer to donors whose commitment to the group is giving when the donor is in a particular mood.

More research analyzing giving on ActBlue will be coming but consider now that the Mothership Network of organizations took in roughly a quarter of a billion dollars and those aligned with “Democratic Power” raked in another sixty million. A lot of this is clearly junk. And it needs to be removed. The only way to do that is control the shelves. Since so far ActBlue has almost entirely failed to police their own shelves, we need the power to do that for them. The Democratic Party is probably the best instrument for doing that.

There are undoubtedly many logistical steps between here and there. But the bottom line remains that if ActBlue is not able to sell Democratic candidates, it dies. So the leverage is clearly there to figure out how to police, and, if necessary, acquire our own. This needs to be done swiftly because leaving such an important function outside of any real controls or safeguards will over the long run prove significantly damaging to our ecosystem. Now is the time to fix this. Of course, it won’t solve all the glitches in our fundraising approach, but it has the potential to make a lot of things better.