Well, that was quick: Less than a day after Grassley’s performance at the Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearing investigating Christine Blasey Ford’s allegation of sexual assault against nominee Brett Kavanaugh, a Crowdpac has been started to fund his future opponent in 2022. In roughly 14 hours, it’s raised about $63,000.
The fund was started by Ady Barkan, the activist behind the Crowdpac to fund Maine senator Susan Collins. Unlike Grassley’s Crowdpac, Collins’s is specifically tied to her vote on Kavanaugh: If she votes yes, the more than $1.6 million already raised goes to fund her opponent in 2020.
It seems likely that of the two, Collins’s views are more likely to be swayed by Barkan’s fundraising and the activism in her own state: her race is two years closer, she’s younger (65 to Grassley’s 85)—and she has a reputation, deserved or not, as a moderate.
These grass-roots fundraising measures go beyond mere dollars, however (though obviously, money helps: OpenSecrets calculates that the better-funded candidate wins 91% of the time): It signals to voters that the candidate is funded by the people and not by the Shadowy BigCorp that, I dunno, secretly wants to run a fracking pipeline under your toilet. Obama out-raised Romney in small-ticket donations; both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump have hung their hats on their man-of-the-people, funded-by-the-people reputations. Andrew Janz, running in California’s 22nd against Devin Nunes, has raised nearly all his money from individual donations, though Nunes has still out-raised Janz, and 538 puts the seat at 97% Nunes.
Long story short: Money matters, and politicians, on both the left and right, feeling answerable to the people instead of Shadowy BigCorp can only be a good thing. So if you have strong feelings about yesterday’s hearings, or other pressing matters, get out your credit card. Nothing yells louder than money.