‘Just apocalyptic’: Small donor shocker spells trouble for GOP ahead of midterms

Republican candidates heading into next week’s midterms drew less than a fifth of small-dollar donations to congressional campaigns, a haul election forecaster G. Elliott Morris called “just apocalyptic.”

Morris, the former editorial director of data analytics overseeing FiveThirtyEight, made the remark Sunday on X. In the same post, he added that his forecasting research found “in-state individual contributions are a strong predictor of results.”

His post shared a new county-level donor map published Saturday by VoteHub, an election data site. The map tracks donations that campaigns reported donor by donor, along with gifts made through the Democratic platform ActBlue and the Republican platform WinRed, from January 2025 through Sept. 30.

According to the map, Democratic candidates took in $588.7 million in donations under $200 over that span. Republican candidates collected $140 million, or 19.1% of the total.

Morris’s post featured maps of Senate races in Texas and Kansas among its examples. Texas is the highest-fundraising contest on VoteHub’s map.

There, state Rep. James Talarico, the Democratic nominee, raised $75.3 million in small donations. His Republican opponent, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, raised $5.37 million, or 6.7% of the pair’s total, according to the map.

The Senate Leadership Fund, the Republican leadership super PAC, has spent more than $124 million on ads promoting Paxton, La Nación reported.

A University of Houston poll of likely Texas voters, conducted Oct. 10-14, put Talarico at 48% and Paxton at 46%, Fox 7 Austin reported.

Georgia was the map’s second-highest-fundraising race. Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA) raised $66.1 million in small donations, while his Republican challenger, Rep. Mike Collins (R-GA), raised $2.72 million, or 4% of the pair’s total, according to VoteHub.

Gifts under $200 made up 34% of the money Republican candidates raised through September, compared with 44% for Democrats, VoteHub’s analysis found. Checks of $2,500 or more made up 37% of Republican money and 25% of Democratic money, the analysis said.

ActBlue processed $1.93 billion from January 2025 through June 2026, more than double WinRed’s $750 million, the analysis added.

Morris added that in-state individual giving is “way stronger than PAC spending” as a predictor. Yet the VoteHub analysis cautioned that “campaign finances are not the clearest signal about electoral performance in November.”

Nineteen minutes after Morris’s post, attorney and political bettor Robert Barnes responded on X to the “strong predictor” finding, writing, “Correct, I’ve used this as a key metric for political bets for multiple cycles.”

Barnes won “high six figures” betting on President Donald Trump’s 2016 victory, the Associated Press reported at the time, citing the Chattanooga Times Free Press.

“Republicans went from being the party whose standard bearer was the King of Low Dollar Donations to the ‘apocalyptic’ Party of Billionaires’ Donations in less than two years,” Big Data Poll director Rich Baris, who ran The Epoch Times poll in 2020, wrote on X.

Baris added that Republicans “also started a new war in the Middle East” — nearly eight months after the U.S. and Israel launched a war against Iran — calling it “totally unrelated, of course.”