You know who I am talking about here, and it’s definitely not the Democrats or the Green Party. There is an aspect of campaign finance which has been largely ignored in recent years, probably due to the focus on Superpacs and “dark money.” However, even if those were eliminated, Republicans would still have an unfair advantage. The reason is that their individual donors tend to be richer those Democratic donors, and thus donate larger sums of money.

The best article that I found explaining this is one by Philip Bump in the Washington Post, from 2014. (I am certain that his conclusions are just as valid now as they were then.) He begins by mentioning that both parties rely mostly on donations from corporate interests and wealthy individuals, but then he said the comparison ends there. Bump includes several graphs in his article. The key one for the present purpose is the last one, which shows the average amount of individual donations to Republicans versus Democrats. If I am reading this correctly, the average donation to Democrats is barely measureable on the graph (probably $27 LOL). However, the average Republican individual donor, donates about $90,000 dollars! I presume that number is skewed by certain very wealthy individuals, but nonetheless it is a HUGE difference. Because of this massive difference, Republicans have been raising much more money overall from individual donors than did Democrats, even though there are far more people who donate to Democrats. Read more