Democrats are Sticking with Embattled ActBlue But Exploring Other Fundraising Options

Democratic fundraising platform ActBlue is under fire from Republicans — the subject of inquiries from both the Department of Justice and Congress — and fraught with internal drama in part chronicled this month in the New York Times.

The thousands of left-leaning campaigns, party committees and political action committees that use ActBlue’s digital fundraising services are mostly sticking with the company — for now.

But some argue that ActBlue’s legal and operational issues necessitate a more diverse digital fundraising strategy. ActBlue, after all, has a de facto monopoly on Democratic digital fundraising: The platform processes billions of dollars in donations every year from millions of individual donors and it’s become the default way left-of-center campaigns raise money online.

“ActBlue has done a tremendous job, and I hope they continue to and I hope this is a blip for them, but I still think we should have a fallback for sure,” said Betsy Hoover, founder of Higher Ground Labs, a venture fund for progressive political technology, and President Barack Obama’s 2012 online organizing director. “In this moment it’s important to not have a single fail point anywhere in our infrastructure, particularly because the Trump administration is running a vengeance campaign and so no one is safe from that.”

President Donald Trump singled out ActBlue in an April 2025 presidential memorandum regarding illegal donors and foreign contributions in elections. In Trump’s second term, ActBlue has also faced scrutiny from the Justice Department and Republicans in Congress. Even President Joe Biden’s 2024 presidential campaign reportedly considered ditching ActBlue. (It didn’t.)

More recently, a New York Times report indicated ActBlue may have misled Congress in its responses to inquiries in 2023.

“We knew ActBlue’s fraud prevention measures were wholly inadequate,” Rep. Jim Jordan, chair of the House Judiciary Committee, wrote on X. “Now we know ActBlue likely misled Congress.”ActBlue declined to comment on questions about competition and the investigations.

Democratic campaign operative Jack Yao said while he believes the Republican investigations are “blatantly partisan,” he advises his clients to utilize multiple fundraising platforms in part because of the Trump administration’s scrutiny of ActBlue.

“ActBlue is important to the digital fundraising infrastructure for Democrats because of the different tools that they have to make it really easy to donate. I’ve also talked to a lot of donors, and my clients have talked to a lot of donors, who will only give on ActBlue because it makes it easier to track their contributions, because it takes less time,” Yao said. “So while it’s still important, I tell all my clients to have multiple payment processing services.”

For Democrats, there are only a handful of alternatives.

Democratic political companies NGP VAN and Action Network feature robust fundraising platforms, and multiple people NOTUS spoke to mentioned GoodChange, Oath and Numero. All three offer fundraising services that are distinct from each other and ActBlue — they all have business models beyond being the payment processor that ActBlue is, and campaigns that use them often do so alongside ActBlue.

“The great thing is that with GoodChange, if ActBlue were to go away, we would be completely set up and fine and ready to move forward,” said Anna-Lee Pittman, deputy campaign manager for Hallie Shoffner, a Democrat running for Senate in Arkansas. “Most of our stuff is done through GoodChange. We have our ActBlue account, mostly because consultants on the front end of setting up the Hallie’s campaign were more accustomed to it.”

Emily Wineland and Becky Pittman, who co-founded GoodChange, told NOTUS that they have served donors from every state and that, unlike ActBlue, they ask donors to cover payment fees, making their service cheaper for campaigns. ActBlue charges a flat 3.95% processing fee on payments sent through its platform.

Becky Pittman said they do see an uptick in interest in their company when ActBlue is subject to negative attention, though they don’t view themselves as benefiting from the company’s problems.

“Diversifying your tech stack is extremely critical,” she said. “If we’re in a world where somebody can hobble a whole political party with a swipe of a pen … we need to build in contingencies. We’ve got to have some redundancies, and we’re all stronger for it. So, you know, we play alongside anybody.”

Oath’s business model is geared primarily toward donors, with co-founder and CEO Brian Derrick describing it as a “safe space.” The company utilizes a proprietary scoring system to indicate to donors where their money will have the most impact, and 1,000 federal, state and state legislature candidates are set up to receive funds through its platform, Derrick told NOTUS.

“While I do think that the attacks on ActBlue and general tumult at the organization have accelerated people’s awareness of some vulnerabilities in the ecosystem, I think that a shift has been underway since before that came to light,” Derrick said. “We need to build new technology and platforms to serve the next generation of campaigns and what Democratic donors are looking for — and that is what Oath is trying to do. I think that we’re the fastest-growing platform outside of ActBlue, and hopefully we have a positive ability to fill that gap and help donors where they need it.”

Derrick added that while they’re not aiming to replace ActBlue, they have the infrastructure to ensure there is no interruption to donors’ ability to fund Democrats should there be some sort of disruption.

“As we’ve been saying for a long time, having a single point of failure is not a good idea right now for a variety of reasons, and I think this is one example,” said Hoover, the Higher Ground Labs founder. “That is part of the reason we have invested in Oath and GoodChange. Because if people do need a fallback, we don’t want to at that point be like, we need to build something. We want to already have something kind of ready to go.”

It’s unclear what the next steps are for Republicans’ investigation into ActBlue, or what the repercussions for any findings would be. Republicans primarily use fundraising platforms WinRed and Anedot for their digital fundraising, although a new, Trump-backed platform called Impact is angling for business.

In the meantime, Democratic congressional candidates and committees continue to raise record amounts of money, largely through ActBlue, ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.

“Will you join the thousands of other Democrats across the country in giving $7 to the DNC today so we can help Democrats win back the Senate this year?” the Democratic National Committee wrote in a fundraising email to supporters Thursday. “If you’ve stored your info with ActBlue, we’ll process your contribution instantly.”