"Daily Kos is back" is a refrain that has suddenly gained traction among political journalists in Washington. They have understandably taken note of the huge sums of money Daily Kos readers poured into Georgia Democrat Jon Ossoff's campaign for a seat Republicans have held since 1979.
As a political journalist by training who worked in Washington, I get it. "Follow the money" is a journalistic mantra. Whether you're covering campaigns or the government or corruption, it always leads to a good story. And Ossoff's $8.3 million haul for a House race during a special election is a mouthwatering morsel political reporters can't ignore.
But while Washington journalists are readily noting the fundraising muscle demonstrated by Daily Kos contributors, many are missing where the real power lies—in the grassroots. It's not Daily Kos that's directing the traffic, it's the traffic that's directing Daily Kos.
As campaigns director Chris Bowers explained to Huffington Post's Ryan Grim, the Daily Kos team puts a race and a candidate on the map for readers and waits to see if they bite. In other words, do Daily Kos readers find it compelling enough to become contributors?
“Among Daily Kos staff, we did not expect just an enormous response for Ossoff and the four other special elections we have supported in 2017,” said Bowers. “What happened was we just saw huge numbers coming back from our initial forays into every special election where we made an endorsement. With numbers like what we were seeing, we would have been foolish not to keep piling on. So, we just kept following our community as far as they were willing to go.”
In fact, political director David Nir told CNN that he sometimes channels his own anti-Trump emotions to give readers more ways to get involved.
"One thing I've experimented with is putting up blog posts asking people to contribute to Ossoff at times when people (myself included!) are really feeling angry and upset at Trump in order to give them something affirmative to do," Nir emailed.
"For instance, I published this post the weekend Trump issued his travel ban. It raised almost $34,000. We then sent out an email based on that post and it raised another $118,000. We've seen similar responses in other similar situations as well."
As Nir’s experiment demonstrates, the whopping 2017 fundraising sums haven't been about Daily Kos directing readers to give, it's been about the grassroots' level of engagement. Ossoff may have raised more than $8 million but his average donation was just over $40 per person. As Nir says, "Follow the small money." Daily Kos has simply provided an avenue for engagement that a lot of people have taken up in the wake of Trump's election. In that sense, the small-dollar donations have not only added up to big money, they've become one metric by which to gauge progressive enthusiasm.
It's a metric that appears to have caught the eye of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC)—or at least it's a metric that's become hard for it to ignore.
When Daily Kos endorsed Ossoff on January 26, the DCCC was still sitting out the Georgia race. But a month later, after Daily Kos readers had contributed nearly $1 million to the upstart’s campaign, the DCCC decided to deploy nine staffers and other resources to the disctrict.
A similar dynamic took place with a Montana special election coming in May. Daily Kos endorsed Rob Quist on March 9; within a month, he got a nearly $1 million bump (Quist donations also averaged about $40), and on Thursday of this week, the DCCC jumped in. (I literally started writing a post Thursday highlighting the DCCC’s absence, and by the time I had finished, its status had changed.)
Now, admittedly, this sounds like I've sat down to write a Daily Kos puff piece (and how can it not, I work here.) But I personally have no role in deciding who to endorse and have genuinely found this fascinating as a journalist, who also happens to write at this site. My main point here is to highlight how grassroots urgency is driving a jaw-dropping amount of small-dollar donations that, in turn, is forcing national Democrats to think—and maybe even act—differently.
In a single week of fundraising for Ossoff, for instance, Daily Kos readers contributed more than $400,000, surpassing the most money the site had ever raised altogether for a single candidate—Elizabeth Warren in 2012.
What is becoming demonstrably true—both in terms of dollars and anecdotal evidence—is that progressives nationwide are not only demanding a broader type of 50-state strategy, they're fueling it.
That is true in Georgia's sixth district, where local activists like Jen Cox are challenging the conventional wisdom of Democratic consultants on something as simple as using yard signs.
And that is true in Montana, where residents like sheep rancher Becky Weed are urging the national party to heed the call of voters on the ground.
“The first thing they could start doing is listening to campaigns like this,” said Ms. Weed. (“Bad name for a farmer,” she joked.) “We got into trouble because they weren’t really listening to people at a grass-roots level. They were trying to direct things from on high, and it’s reparable — but we got to do it fast.”
While it's impossible to say whether the DCCC would have gone into Georgia or Montana under different circumstances, what is true is that the grassroots energy is opening new doors. Even if the DCCC had gotten into either race without it, the effort would have fallen flat.
When Buzzfeed’s Ben Smith declared this week that “Daily Kos is back” in a way he hadn’t “seen for a decade,” Hillary Clinton’s former press secretary weighed in on the changing dynamic:
I would say: The grassroots is back, and the Democratic party is so much the better for it.