NPR: Where did Bush's 2000 donors go?

I hope this hasn't been diaried.  But I found this article via Avedon Carol's blog The Sideshow:

Political Puzzler: Bush Gets Fewer Repeat Donors by Peter Overby

Politicians stand in awe of President Bush's ability to extract dollars from donors: $94.5 million in the 1999-2000 cycle, $274.2 million in 2003-04. In both campaigns, he raised expectations to levels no previous candidate had dared, and then beat them.

Now comes another number that seems to shatter the conventional wisdom.

Political scientist Michael Malbin finds that just 30 percent of Mr. Bush's donors for 2000 came back and gave again for 2004.

That's right: Among the donors who put George W. Bush in the White House, seven out of 10 decided not to help him stay there.

Say what?  Where did Bush's 2000 donors go?  Who replaced them?  Since Bush roughly tripled his take from the 2000 cycle, the raise in the hard money cap from $1000 to $2000 surely can't account for it.

And the same story holds on the Dem side too:

Donor attrition was even worse for the Democrats. Only one-quarter of Al Gore's donors from 2000, and 21 percent of Bill Bradley's, gave to any Democratic presidential hopeful in the 2004 primaries.

(All of the fundraising in both parties, of course, was for the period prior to the conventions. All major-party nominees used public financing for the general election campaigns.)

On the Democratic side this makes some sense because of all the new 527s and PACs that sprang up in response to McCain-Feingold and its loopholes.  Liberals who weren't too fond of Kerry or any of his primary rivals could give to MoveOn, ACT or one of the other of the liberal 527s among the 97 registered political action committees (63 of them founded after McCain Feingold passed).  Meanwhile, the Democrats quadrupled the number of small donors (though Malbin's study only accounts for people who gave $200 or more, missing roughly 1/3 of all donors according to this old Washington Post article) even though donations of $1000 or more were still the most prevalent type of donation for both parties.  Specifically:

The number of small donors to Republicans and Democrats alike has soared since the last election, according to an analysis of Federal Election Commission records by the Campaign Finance Institute, a nonprofit group in Washington. A third of the money given to the Democratic candidates in this election cycle was in amounts less than $200; in the 2000 election, only 17 percent of the contributions were that small. Bush has doubled his percentage of under-$200 donations, from 10 percent in 2000 to 20 percent this year. Over the same time, the percentage of $1,000-or-more donations to Bush has remained almost flat.

So it could be that medium-sized (>$200) Gore and Bradley donors were splitting their contributions between the primary field and other liberal orgs and therefore not showing up in the study.  But that doesn't explain the phenominon on the Republican side.  Until the SBV"T" came along, there weren't really that many obvious substitutes for conservative cash that I recall.

Back to the Overby article:

In...earlier studies, donors and fundraisers claimed re-giving rates that were roughly double what Malbin found. Now Wilcox [another researcher] is revising an upcoming study to include questions for donors who gave in 2000 and disappeared in 2004.

A few possible, or partial, explanations:

• First, a small percentage of donors die, get sick, spend their money on other things or otherwise stop giving. Two dozen of the original Pioneers disengaged for a happier reason: They were appointed ambassadors and went overseas, where it's harder to network.

• Second, some of the missing 2000 donors redirected their money to other pro-Bush causes for 2004. Malbin says a significant number gave to the Republican National Committee -- although not enough to explain all of the donor-list decay.

• Third, the earlier studies could simply be wrong. Many of them used the self-reporting of donors and fundraisers, who may remember their intentions better than their acts -- or have other reasons to misstate the facts.

• Fourth, and most significantly, when the donors from 2000 were asked to give again, they might have just said no. Not because they'd become disillusioned with Mr. Bush, but because the magic of his first campaign in 2000 was gone.

• Or, as Republican fundraising consultant Dan Morgan said, they simply decide, "He's in there [the White House]. He doesn't need my money anymore."
  

I'm confused about the "RNC" part.  Didn't McCain-Feingold limit how much could be given by individuals and corporations to the RNC and DNC prior to the conventions?  And none of this answers the question of, if Bush lost more than half of his 2000 bundling "pioneer" base, where did he find all those new donors?  Neither the hard money cap hike nor the increase in small donors reported in the Post article can account for it.

The raw numbers look like a massive shift in who is being active in politics (the WaPo article above also implies this idea).  But this doesn't square with voting patterns.  According to exit polls, 83% of this year's voters voted in 2000 and well over 95% of Bush's 2000 voters (vs. about 80% of Gore's) turned out (some of this discrepency is probably due to people misrepresenting their previous vote to exit pollsters.)  Among those who turned out, only about 9% of Bush's and 10% of Gore's voters switched their party vote (interestingly, the percentage of declared first-time-ever voters -- 11% -- didn't change beteen 2000 and 2004 though it went slightly more Republican this time).  Though there were some demographic shifts (in particular urban voters, seniors and white married women voting more Republican; small town voters and the male youth vote going more Democratic), according to Harvard's Barry C. Burden in his (unimpressive IMO) post-election study, "the overall pattern was one of statis".

In other words, it doesn't look like a massive disillusionment with Bush among his 2000 support base (as many of us, including me, hoped) that would send him searching for a whole new class of donors.  Yet, unless there's an error in the study, that's what it looks like happened.

Anyone who knows more about campaign finance than me want to have a crack at explaining this?