Will Donors Stick with Joe Biden? | Pivot

Brian Derrick is a political strategist and the CEO and founder of Oath, a fundraising platform that uses data to rate and identify high-stake elections. Um, the aim is to direct donors to campaigns where their money will have the maximum impact. Brian, welcome.

Thank you for having me on.

Okay. Uh, so let's talk about Oath. T- talk about how it works in terms of taking donations and directing the money, 'cause as Scott just said a second ago before you came on, money is where it's at. And he calls himself a porpoise, he will explain it to you, um, of a donation. But you said the problem Oath is trying to solve is a tendency for donors to rage donate into the abyss.

There are a lot of villains in the political ecosystem that get people very angry and that generate this emotional response, whether it's Marjorie Taylor Greene or Lauren Boebert or somebody else. And in the last eight years, that has really turbocharged this grassroots donor environment where people see something happen on the news or hear about it on a podcast, on Twitter, and then immediately run and donate to try and get that person out of office, when really those funds could be much better used somewhere else, maybe just to keep that person out of power. Um, and so what we set up with Oath is a free platform where people can go see what their donations are actually going to accomplish.

Mm-hmm.

Um, we, we do objective analysis to say where are dollars needed the most to advance the thing that you care about right now, whether that's repro rights or protecting democracy-

Mm-hmm.

... and how can you direct it as strategically as possible, um, without getting sort of the blowback of 1,000 text messages and phone calls asking for more money?

All right. Scott?

So before you came on, I trifurcated donors into three buckets, and my sense is the thing that gets him out probably the most quickly, let's assume that he's totally defiant and doesn't... sees Nancy, Speaker Pelosi at his door and just says, "Sorry, Nancy, I'm not interested in talking to anybody," and says, you know, it's Obama on line one and he says, "I'm not interested." He just goes totally defiant. If the money tap gets shut off, it gets very hard for him to stay in the race. And loosely speaking, three buckets. And by the way, tell me if these are the wrong buckets. Big donors, medium-sized, small donor. My sense are the big donors is they're just taking a wait-and-see attitude. They're not gonna throw millions of dollars into an abyss and not understand if and who it's going to. My sense are the medium-sized bo- donors, and this is anecdotal evidence and I'm one of them, is that we are in open revolt. We are not only signing letters and have stopped giving money to the Biden campaign, but are starting to give money and are ready and prepping to give money to other candidates. And then the small do- money donors are just getting inundated with desperate emails from the Biden campaign as they attempt to show some signs of life. Tell me w- where I got that wrong and, and what it means in terms of is the tap going to get... Has it been shut off?