Joint fundraising: A campaign strategy to increase contributions

You’ve seen those generic-sounding election fundraising organizations on ads — names like “Biden Victory Fund” or “Save America.” Those are fundraising outfits that make it possible to collect serious contributions without running afoul of limits. These are “joint fundraising committees,” and back in 2020, they raised more than $2.5 billion, according to Open Secrets, which tracks campaign finance data. So far this election cycle, they’ve pulled in $1 billion and counting.

So how exactly do they work? Marketplace’s senior Washington correspondent Kimberly Adams has been tracking this. She spoke with “Marketplace Morning Report” host David Brancaccio and the following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

David Brancaccio: How is a joint fundraising committee different from a PAC [political action committee] or a candidate campaign?

Kimberly Adams: You can think of them sort of as umbrella organizations. They can include a candidate’s committee, a PAC, national party committees, state party committees, convention committees — the list goes on. But the key thing is that while each of these groups has a limit to how much one person can donate to them, when they connect under that umbrella of the joint fundraising committee, they can combine all those limits together and ask donors for one big check. I had Ki Hong, lead of the political law group at the firm Skadden, Arps, walk me through some of the numbers for the presidential race.

Ki Hong: You can give $41,300 per year to the national party committee’s main account. You can give another $123,900 to each of the special accounts that the DNC [Democratic National Committee] and the RNC [Republican National Committee] have. Plus another $6,600 for the candidate’s campaign. And then you add up $10,000 for each of the state party committees that participate.

Adams: And there can be like 51 of those state parties. [Washington, D.C. is included in that mix even though it’s not a state.] You can see how those numbers add up pretty quickly. Hong works with companies often on the receiving end of these asks, and says last cycle JFCs were asking for around $600,000 checks — this cycle upwards of $800,000.

Brancaccio: Why raise money this way instead of each campaign maintaining its own list of donors, though?

Adams: It’s a faster way to raise money from very wealthy donors and groups, rather than dozens of individual campaigns reaching out and asking for that money, and having the individual having to track the limits on each of those donations. They can write one big check that gets distributed via a formula — usually the candidate first, then the party or other groups. But it’s also a way to share operating expenses, and for the stars of a party to raise money that can then get spread out in other races. Here’s lawyer Ki Hong again.

Hong: The most successful JFCs you see out there are well-entrenched, longstanding members of Congress, right? So, those who are leaders, they don’t have any worries about their own election. It’s a way for them to help out their colleagues.

Adams: Some successful examples of this are the Jeffries Victory Fund, or the Scalise Leadership Fund, named after those members of Congress.