Here comes the green tsunami

Yesterday I posted about implications of widespread vote-by-mail and early voting in building engaged citizenship among some of the people who need to come into the process in order to fulfill this country's democratic promise. Still thinking about that ...

But there's another form of enhanced participation which is upending the democratic process in this cycle. The media (and GOPers who find themselves swamped by it and are whining) are calling it the "Green Tsunami."

Huge numbers of Democratic-inclined citizens who have some disposable income are putting their money behind their political preferences on an unheard of scale.

... Where most of the top Democratic Senate candidates two years ago raised $4 million to $7 million in the third quarter of 2018, their contenders this year are multiplying those totals. Colorado’s John Hickenlooper raised $22 million, more than six times what his presidential campaign raised before he dropped out of that race in 2019. Iowa’s Theresa Greenfield and North Carolina’s Cal Cunningham each cleared $28 million.

And on Sunday, South Carolina Democrat Jaime Harrison announced a record $57 million third-quarter haul for his race against GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham, where the most favorable public polling for Graham in the last month has shown him leading by a single point. Altogether, the money has given Democrats a TV spending edge in 12 of the 13 most expensive Senate races.

Markos Moulitos (that's "kos" of the activist website Daily Kos) is crowing about this. He sees it as the fruition of an end run by progressive Democratic bloggers and other outsiders around an enervated Party consultant apparatus. Way back in 2005, he saw the potential for the giving platform Act Blue:

... The promise of what I wrote in 2005 has come true: [Republican donors] write the big check, and millions of us click “donate,” and we raise more money. Far more money.

... [The small donor fundraising portal] ActBlue emerged from the grassroots, and harnessed the networked power of the early blogs and emerging social media to become the Democratic fundraising standard from the bottom up. ...

Ever caustic as well as sharply observant, kos thinks he knows why the Republicans cannot seem to create an analogous grassroots funding stream:

... you have Trump bragging about how rich he is. Remember how Michael Bloomberg had to fund his entire campaign himself? People aren’t generally motivated to give money to people who are already rich. But then there’s the fact that the GOP never had to bother appealing to its core base. I mean, look at those deplorables! Much more pleasant to collect checks over cocktails from the Captains of Industry and assorted trust fund babies.

He's right about that. I feel sure that Republican elites do despise many of their base voters.

But also, I suspect the 2020 Democratic Green Tsunami is the outgrowth of one of the truly mystifying aspects of Trump's victory in 2016. Somehow he managed to win without the support of the parts of the country on which the nation's economic well-being depends.

Donald Trump lost most of the American economy in [the 2016] election. According to the Brookings analysis, the less-than-500 counties that Clinton won nationwide combined to generate 64 percent of America's economic activity in 2015. The more-than-2,600 counties that Trump won combined to generate 36 percent of the country's economic activity last year.

Might the flood of campaign cash be the revenge of an urban and suburban, still reasonably secure, working and middle class who saw their political preferences trashed by the Trump ascendancy? This seems right. 

Will they remain engaged should they manage to evict the presenting plutocrat? It will take awhile to see. But active citizenship is a habit and this seems a healthy trend. Small donors rock!