Funding National Nominating Conventions: Have Campaign Finance Loopholes Turned a Trickle of Money into a Flood?

The U.S. major party presidential conventions are an essential platform for a party’s branding and messaging for the upcoming presidential and congressional elections. The conventions also can provide revenue and media attention to their host cities, and consequently, convention fundraising has grown substantially in recent decades. Convention fundraising rules were changed in 2014, tripling the limit for contributions to the party campaign funds and removing limits on contributions to host committees. Although we do not expect these changes to affect individual donors, we expect corporations, banks, and labor unions to have taken advantage of these new rules. Elections since 2014 have, however, been unusual in many ways – for instance, in the relationship between the nominees and their parties and, in 2020, the public health precautions required to hold conventions. This paper considers the development in party convention fundraising since 2014, focusing on the relationships between candidates, their parties, and the cities in which conventions have been held. To make this determination, funding reports were collected for the 2000-2020 election cycles since. The paper explores changes in the characteristics of convention donors – their other contributions, their relationships to candidates, party committees, and the host cities – and notes variations that might be attributable to the nominees or the host cities. It considers whether the new convention funding rules have matured enough that it is possible to make broad claims about the effects of the rules themselves.