Republican Fundraising Traffic Spikes After Mar-a-Lago Search

The day after the FBI executed a search warrant at the Florida resort and residence of former President Donald J. Trump the primary Republican fundraising website saw an explosion in traffic. For WinRed, the primary fundraising website that competes head-to-head with the Democrats’ ActBlue, the surge magnified a traffic lead the site has held all year. That’s despite the surge in attention ActBlue saw after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.

While there is not necessarily a one-to-one relationship between fundraising website visitors and donors or dollars, donation website traffic can be an early indicator of who is winning the money race – with Republicans looking like they’re gaining on the strength of outrage over the search.

Key takeaways

• WinRed attracted about 855,438 visits on August 9, the day after the search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, according to Similarweb estimates. All of the statistics cited here are for website traffic from within the United States.
• In the first 15 days of August, WinRed averaged 527,585 visits per day, 37% higher than the average of about 384,000 for the first seven months of the year.
• ActBlue averaged 398,544 visits over the first 15 days of August, compared with about 369,000 for the first seven months of the year, or 8% higher.
• WinRed traffic has topped 500,000 visits nearly every day since Aug. 9. If that level were sustained through the end of the month, WinRed would end august with nearly 16 million visits, or more traffic than it has seen since January 2021, the month a pro-Trump mob broke into the U.S. Capitol, alleging that the election had been stolen.
• Even before the Mar-a-Lago warrant was served, WinRed was leading ActBlue in traffic so far in 2022. The exceptions were in May and June when ActBlue attracted more traffic in the immediate aftermath of the Supreme Court decision striking down Roe v. Wade abortion rights. WinRed was back in the lead in July, with 14 million visits to a little more than 13 million for ActBlue.

The August 9 Surge

WinRed saw a surge in traffic immediately following the search of Mar-a-Lago.

Although Trump fans likely drove a lot of that traffic, the most referrals over the past 28 days actually came from the friendsofdesantis.com website for supporters of Florida Gov. Ron Desantis – a potential alternative Republican candidate for 2024 – with a 7.92% of referrals based on desktop web traffic, compared with 7.62% for donaldjtrump.com and its subdomains. A fundraising website for Texas Gov. Greg Abbott also drove more referrals than Trump’s website, with a 7.71% share.

In other words, some WinRed visitors might be seeking to boost an alternative to Trump in the light of the allegations of improper handling of classified documents, rather than supporting Trump himself. Or it could be simpler than that: both DeSantis and Abbott are in the midst of active reelection campaigns.

WinRed Leads in Traffic for 2022

The two partisan fundraising sites had been running about neck and neck until recently, but with WinRed capturing the lead in traffic overall. For 2022 That’s a reversal from 2020 when ActBlue led in traffic through Election Day and beyond.

Dueling outrage

Republican resentment of Joe Biden’s leadership has driven an elevated flow of traffic to WinRed all year long, although it reportedly has not translated into the volume of small-dollar donations Republicans would like to see. With traffic surging to levels not seen since January 2021, that could now change.

The Similarweb Insights & Communications team is available to pull additional or updated data on request for the news media (journalists are invited to write to press@similarweb.com). When citing our data, please reference Similarweb as the source and link back to the most relevant blog post or similarweb.com/blog/insights/.

Methodology

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Image by Grégory ROOSE from Pixabay

by David F. Carr

David covers social media, digital advertising, and generative AI. With a background in web trends since the 1990s, he’s also the author of "Social Collaboration for Dummies".