Are you a Democratic campaign looking to increase your small-dollar contributions? Target female donors.
That was one possible takeaway from a new report by the Center for American Women and Politics, which is hosted by Rutgers University. CAWP released some early findings from its “Women, Money, & Politics Watch 2024” project last month.
The project, which uses data from the non-partisan group OpenSecrets, is focused on analyzing giving to congressional candidates in Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Mexico, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Washington.
One top-line finding: “Women outnumber men as contributors who gave $200 or less to Democratic congressional candidates in all ten focus states,” according to CAWP.
“It’s a bright spot in that it shows women’s engagement as donors, and it shows that they are participating at that level and are involved,” said Kira Sanbonmatsu, a researcher at CAWP. “We see that more with contributions to Democratic candidates more consistently.”
She added that women still remain “underrepresented as the large donors.”
“I think the different levels at which men and women are giving is yielding the overall differential in which men are contributing more of the money when you sum it up than women,” she said.
CAWP has been researching women’s giving for some time now. But one change to its methodology is that the Center is now analyzing donor data in conjunction with the voter file, which helps the researchers attach race and ethnicity information to the contributor.
An early conclusion is that white women are “better represented as contributors than other racial/ethnic groups of women.” That said, in Michigan there is a significant number of Asian-American women — contributing 2 percent of all money to congressional candidates — who are giving. “We’ve known that there is a racial gap in donations,” said Sanbonmatsu.
“This analysis has given us a chance to look at the more fine grain level in terms of women’s giving. And so the very low proportion of all money that given by black women, Latinas, Asian-American women, this speaks to the challenges of getting more diverse women donors involved.”
An underlying question for practitioners is whether women’s political giving is reflective of overall structural economic inequalities (women earning 84 cents to every dollar a man earns) or campaigns’ fundraising strategies.
“I think it’s probably a combination of both,” said Sanbonmatsu. “Because I think that candidates may overlook these communities because they may have, on the aggregate level, fewer economic resources.
“But there are a lot of ways to get involved. And I think it is important that just as we think about who is participating from a gender and race lens with respect to voting. We should care about who was participating in terms of giving. Finding ways to mobilize these communities in terms of this form of political voice, I think would be important.”
