10 months ago
Former Georgia Sen. Kelly Loeffler is back on the national political scene trying to give Republicans a leg up in the campaign tech space.
She shared plans with POLITICO to roll out RallyRight, a technology company that offers a suite of products: DonateRight, a donation processing service intended to rival major players like WinRed; FieldRight, a gig economy app that connects canvassers to campaigns; and RelayRight, a texting tool.
Republicans have long attempted to close the gap with Democrats in online fundraising infrastructure. Democrats established ActBlue, the party’s major donation platform, years before Republicans had their version, WinRed.
Republicans have lagged Democrats in fundraising, particularly from small-dollar donors. In the first half of 2023, the most recent data available, Democrats on ActBlue far outraised Republicans on WinRed.
WinRed has a stranglehold on Republican online donations, but there have also been complaints with the service. Last year, WinRed suggested that it needed to raise its prices, drawing the ire of national Republicans. The company has also come under fire for automatically opting donors into recurring payments.
Loeffler's fundraising platform builds on technology purchased from top GOP firm Targeted Victory. She's betting that DonateRight can compete with WinRed — which has boomed since launching in the 2020 cycle — by offering lower transaction fees, 3.5 percent to WinRed’s 3.94 percent. DonateRight also avoids tactics that can lead to donor fatigue, like automatically signing people up for recurring donations or sharing donor data with other vendors. But price and features aren't everything, and WinRed still offers scale that may make it a more attractive choice for federal campaigns.
“There's a need for a lot of competitors in the space,” Loeffler said in an interview. She decided to start a company herself, she said, “because the infrastructure we have is not a winning infrastructure.”
Loeffler's other venture, FieldRight, is looking to emulate the gig economy model to help campaigns find workers to beef up their field operations. Ground game can be a sore spot, as evidenced by the high-dollar efforts playing out on the presidential level — with to-be-seen effectiveness. Loeffler lost narrowly to Democrat Raphael Warnock in a 2021 runoff after being appointed to the Senate in 2019 and blamed her loss in part on Democrats having a strong statewide field program in place long before the runoff. FieldRight is designed to provide an on-demand field program to campaigns of all sizes, including smaller local races that may not have the ability to stand up one of their own.
“The cost of entry to field for a lot of campaigns is very high these days,” said GOP consultant Aaron Whitehead, who used the app last year in the Kentucky governor’s race. “Being able to have essentially an Uber-type gig economy app to go into and say, ‘Hey, I need to knock on 5,000 doors,’ … will really change the game for Republicans and help us win more races across the board.”
Loeffler argued that FieldRight is more efficient than the traditional approach, which can take weeks to find enough people and train them. The app uses artificial intelligence to create walking routes for door-knocking and flags fraud — an issue campaigns have run into before with canvassers.
“We have to defend races at every level, and you do that by supplying the infrastructure for them to succeed at every level: municipal to federal races,” she said. Loeffler, who self-funded much of her 2020 bid, said she is funding RallyRight with a personal multimillion dollar investment.
Loeffler piloted DonateRight and FieldRight during the 2023 off-year elections, including in Virginia, Mississippi and Kentucky. Loeffler said FieldRight currently has about 500 canvassers across 45 states, all of whom have gone through background checks and training before they are allowed to work with a campaign. Local and federal campaigns in 26 states are using DonateRight.
Whitehead advised a super PAC supporting Kentucky Republican Daniel Cameron’s unsuccessful bid for governor last year. He described Republicans’ field efforts as “lagging” compared to Democrats — in Kentucky, for instance, Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear had more “institutional support” from unions to knock on doors.
The pro-Cameron PAC used FieldRight to target voters the group identified as needing contact beyond mailers and TV ads: potential swing voters who liked both former President Donald Trump and Beshear. Still, Cameron lost to Beshear by 5 points. Whitehead said he plans to use the service in more races across the country this year, including in Georgia and New Mexico.
Users say the biggest potential for RallyRight is in state and local races, where cash-strapped campaigns can benefit from more affordable campaign tools. A Republican consultant, granted anonymity to speak about client matters, has worked with both local and federal campaigns who used DonateRight. This person said the platform needs to build out more backend features to support the high volume of donations for federal races.
“These were challenges that WinRed had in the beginning,” the consultant said, pointing out that Anedot, another donation platform Republicans use, had similar issues when it first started. He said DonateRight is "doing a great job of building it out. But there's some real limitations right now.”
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