 | |
| Formation | 2019 |
|---|---|
| Type | For-profit |
| Location | |
Key people | Gerrit Lansing |
| Affiliations | Republican Party |
| Website | winred |
WinRed is an American fundraising platform for the Republican Party endorsed by the Republican National Committee (RNC). It was launched to compete with the Democratic Party's success in online grassroots fundraising with their platform ActBlue. [1]
WinRed is a for-profit fundraising platform built for the American Republican Party. [2] [3] Republican leadership began discussing the possibility of building a competitor to ActBlue within days of the 2018 midterm results. WinRed was called Patriot Pass in its initial announcements, with an expected release date of February 2019. [4] [5] The name was changed following Robert Kraft's complaints that the name resembled that of his football team, the New England Patriots. [4]
The Republican party, the Trump re-election campaign, and other state-wide and local-level races across the United States used the platform as of late 2019, with nearly 800 campaigns using the platform by May 2020. [6] WinRed discloses donor information to the Federal Election Commission. [7]
WinRed merged Revv, a Republican payment processing firm founded in December 2014 by Gerrit Lansing, and DataTrust, the party's voter data repository. The platform allows one-click donations. [8] [9]
In 2019, the RNC and the Trump administration applied heavy pressure to motivate all Republican campaigns to use the platform. [3] In April 2020, the platform expanded from its previous representation of only federal-level candidates and opened support to state- and local-level races. [10]
WinRed says that it reports all contributions processed to federal campaigns to the Federal Election Commission, regardless of the amount. [11] When a candidate for a federal election raises money through WinRed, WinRed serves as a conduit for election law purposes. [11] [12] When donations pass through a conduit such as WinRed or ActBlue donors names and contributions are itemized and reported and made publicly available on the Internet. [13] [14]
By contrast, small donors of up to $200 are not automatically reported to the FEC if they contributed directly to a federal campaign committee. [13] [15]
In 2024 the Institute for Free Speech sued the FEC over the discrepancy whereby small donors utilizing conduits WinRed or ActBlue are automatically made public but same-sized direct donations are not. [14]
WinRed took in US$30 million in its first three months after launch, $100 million in its first six, and $130 million in the first quarter of 2020. (For comparison, ActBlue brought in $141 million in April 2020, compared to $60 million for WinRed. [16] ) Donald Trump was the largest beneficiary, with six senators raising at least $1 million each. Lansing, as well as various Republican operatives, attributed some of this success to the effort to impeach Trump at the time. On the day after Trump's first impeachment was announced, the Trump campaign and the RNC received over $5 million. [6] [3] [10] Lansing reported that Trump had received 52% of overall donations as of May 2020. [17] WinRed raised over $2 billion over its first 15 months. [18]
As part of party negotiations to launch WinRed, the platform Victory Pass was expected to close. The nonpartisan platform Anedot was not involved in discussions among party leadership. [5]
The Trump administration sent a cease and desist letter to WinRed's rival Anedot. [2] The Republican State Leadership Committee, which is in charge of the ".gop" top-level internet domain, revoked the domain registration of the "Give.GOP" website, which re-branded and re-launched in July 2019 as "Right.us". [19] The national Republican party has said it will limit national party committee investments and data to federal candidates and state parties who use WinRed. [2]
Following the aggressive push for Republican campaigns to use WinRed, many party officials, fundraisers, and campaign operatives criticized the effort. [20] Some critiqued the requirement that campaigns use WinRed, arguing that the effort pushed aside older services preferred by campaigns like Anedot or Give.GOP. Others expressed concern about profits, noting that it was unclear who stood to gain from use of the service and comparing the higher fees of WinRed to those of competitors. [2]
In the weeks following launch, state officials and campaign operatives pushed back against the Republican Party's consolidation behind WinRed, arguing that the party's acceptance of a monopoly over fundraising violated free-market principles. In addition, they expressed concern that the platform might constitute a money and data grab. [19]
Following the 2020 campaign, several Trump donors said they were unknowingly billed for recurring contributions to his campaign, with some having as much as several thousand dollars deducted without their knowledge. Some experts attributed this, at least in part, to how WinRed's platform was set up. WinRed uses prefilled checkboxes that donors needed to manually uncheck to prevent repeat donations. In addition, unlike ActBlue, WinRed keeps a percentage of refunded contributions. [21] After the release of that reporting, the National Republican Congressional Committee continued to use the same tactics in their fundraising on WinRed. [22]
In 2022, a judge gave permission for continuing an investigation by several state attorneys general into WinRed's fundraising practices. [23]
In July 2022, WinRed's expense disclosures were called into question by donor watchdog Campaign Legal Center. WinRed reported less than $2,700 in operating expenses since 2019 despite processing over $2.8 billion in donations, an implausibly small cost. [24]
In April 2023, The New York Times reported that WinRed was proposing to increase transaction fees on donations made through its site, citing a decline in contributions the previous year, but the plan had stalled over opposition from Republican leaders. [25]
In November 2023, the conservative O'Keefe Media Group released a video purporting to question a donor as to the authenticity of some donations listed on the Federal Election Commission's website that were made with their own personal details. The subject denied donating the funds listed in the database, which was listed as ~$154,000 over 10,000 separate donations. [26]
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