Morning Distribution for Monday, July 17, 2023

A [FiveThirtyEight]( email [Morning Distribution]( Monday, July 17, 2023 Your daily briefing from FiveThirtyEight --------------------------------------------------------------- The Morning Story [GOP Presidential Candidates Attend Merrimack Fourth of July Parade]( [The Creative Fundraising Tactics Some Republicans Are Using To Make The Debate Stage]( By [Geoffrey Skelley]( When the Republican National Committee [released its qualification rules]( for the GOP’s first primary debate in August, a few Republican presidential contenders [winced at the prospect]( of needing 40,000 unique donors to make the stage. Just six candidates have reached or eclipsed that mark so far, and it remains to be seen if some lesser-known candidates can do the same. The donor requirement has created a perverse incentive in which some campaigns are willing to lose more money attracting donors than what they raise from them. Rather than trying to maximize the total amount of money they raise from donors, campaigns desperate to make the debate stage find themselves working to maximize the raw number of individual contributors, regardless of the costs. With the pressure on, low-polling Republican campaigns are embracing creative measures to boost their donor counts. In the spirit of [FiveThirtyEight’s long]( [history of using]( [backronyms]( [in analyses]( we decided to rank zany fundraising techniques based on a far-from-precise system we called DONORS: Dispensing Our Nuttiest Offerings to Reach the Stage. We prioritized the most outlandish and/or unprecedented gimmicks for attracting donors that could also cost the campaigns money relative to what they’ll bring in. [Read more]( --------------------------------------------------------------- Weekly Listen [Play]( [Politics Podcast: What’s So Special About ‘Bidenomics’?]( [FiveThirtyEight] [View in browser]( [ABC News]( [Unsubscribe]( Our mailing address: FiveThirtyEight, 47 West 66th Street, New York, NY 10023.