The scarce resource is not money. It is ideas and judgment.
That is an odd thing for a political action committee to say.
Political action committees are supposed to ask for money. They are supposed to build lists, cultivate donors, send urgent emails, and explain why democracy, freedom, sanity, or civilization itself depends on a contribution before midnight.
We are not going to do that.
This is not because money never matters in politics. It does. But for an organization like CIVPAC, and for the kind of politics we are trying to encourage, money is not the scarce resource. Judgment is. Seriousness is. A willingness to think clearly about tradeoffs is. A willingness to support good candidates even when they are imperfect, and to oppose bad policies even when they come from one’s own side, is.
A recent Atlantic article by Idrees Kahloon makes the point sharply. Small-dollar donors were once imagined as the democratic answer to big money in politics. (CIVPAC has even taken that position itself.) Instead, the evidence increasingly suggests that small-dollar fundraising can reward outrage, ideological extremity, nationalized grievance, and performative politics. Kahloon cites examples of vast sums flowing into long-shot races because donors despised the opposing candidate: $55 million in small donations to Amy McGrath’s 2020 race against Mitch McConnell, $71 million to Jaime Harrison’s race against Lindsey Graham, and nearly $10 million already raised by Eileen Laubacher against Lauren Boebert in a Colorado district Donald Trump carried by 18 points in 2024. The problem is not civic engagement. The problem is that anger is easy to monetize, and anger does not allocate political resources wisely.
The underlying research by Zachary Albert and Raymond La Raja is even more sobering. Their book, Small Donors in US Politics, finds that small donors are not a representative cross-section of ordinary voters. They tend to be more socioeconomically advantaged, more intensely partisan, and more ideological than non-donors. They often give to high-profile, ideologically extreme, nationally visible candidates rather than to competitive local or down-ballot races where money might do more good.
There is a reasonable counterargument. Small donors are citizens. They are participating. Wealthy donors and dark money remain serious problems, and small-donor systems can sometimes broaden participation. (That is the case that CIVPAC was making.) The Brennan Center argues that critics overstate the role of small donors in polarization and that public financing can encourage candidates to raise money from their own constituents rather than chase national notoriety.
That is a fair caution. The lesson is not that small donors are bad people. The lesson is that money, including small money, can create bad incentives. A politics funded by emotional reaction can become a politics designed to produce emotional reaction. Candidates learn to perform for the donor class, not the electorate. Consultants learn to write the email that gets opened, not the argument that deserves to be believed. The system rewards the person who can make you furious faster than the person who can help you think.
Centrists should be especially wary of this trap.
There is a long history of expensive centrist efforts that produced far less than their funders hoped.
Americans Elect spent a reported $35 million in 2012 trying to build a centrist third-party vehicle and then failed to find a candidate who could meet its own support thresholds. That may well have been because in 2012 we were confronted by two major-party presidential candidates, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, who, with the benefit of hindsight, feel remarkably centrist.
No Labels later raised tens of millions for a 2024 “unity ticket” effort; Reuters reported that the group said it had raised $50 million, even as its leaders warned that no viable candidates might emerge. The effort ultimately ended without a ticket because no candidate with a credible path to winning emerged.
Those two efforts alone involved roughly $85 million. Other centrist projects, reform organizations, unity campaigns, ballot-access drives, and good-government efforts add many millions more. Some of that work was honorable. Some of it may have helped indirectly. But the record should make us humble.
A large pile of money does not magically create a constituency. It does not change the fact that America’s winner-take-all elections make third-party politics brutally difficult. It does not substitute for the slow work of persuasion.
For CIVPAC, the juice is not worth the squeeze.
We do not need to become another organization that spends most of its energy raising money so that it can spend money asking for more money. We do not need to build a direct-mail machine, hire fundraising consultants, or discover which subject line produces the highest level of panic. We do not want to confuse political seriousness with fundraising success.
What we want is more valuable and harder to buy.
We want people to argue with us. We want people to tell us when we have missed something important about a race. We want local knowledge about candidates who are serious, practical, pro-democracy, and willing to govern rather than perform. We want better definitions of centrism — not mushy moderation, not splitting the difference, not “both sides” reflexes, but a politics grounded in liberal democracy, institutional stability, fiscal realism, and personal freedom. We believe in market economics — capitalism, if you like — not as a tribal slogan, but because markets usually work better than politics at allocating resources. We also believe in competent government where government is necessary.
We want readers who will ask: Is this candidate trying to solve problems or build a brand on the back of outrage and anger? Is this policy efficient, fair, and politically sustainable? Does this argument survive contact with facts? Does it respect tradeoffs? Does it strengthen democratic institutions or weaken them? Does it make compromise easier or harder?
That kind of engagement is more useful to us than a check.
CIVPAC’s endorsements are not, at this stage, kingmaking exercises. We are not pretending that our support will decide most races. Our endorsements are public markers: statements about the kind of politics we believe deserves support and the kind of politics we believe should be resisted.
That may sound modest. It is modest. But it is also honest.
The country does not lack political money. It lacks political judgment. It lacks citizens willing to say that some candidates on their own side are reckless, some candidates on the other side are responsible.
So no, we are not asking for your money.
We are asking for your attention, your criticism, your local knowledge, your arguments, and your willingness to help build a politics that rewards seriousness instead of outrage.
If that sounds like less than a contribution, it is not.
It is the contribution we actually need.