Give.GOP will launch on Tuesday. It comes a week after the rollout of WinRed, a platform adopted by all national Republican campaign committees and praised by Trump via tweet after its debut.
Top Republican leaders and donors have sought to find one platform for their online giving since Democrats’ online giving portal, ActBlue , played a pivotal role in their 2018 midterm success . The nonprofit served as a conduit that funneled more than $1.6 billion to Democratic campaigns.
Republicans’ campaigns, however, use a hodgepodge of more than a dozen for-profit companies to collect online contributions. That cedes an advantage to a monolithic platform like ActBlue, which allows donors to give to candidates up and down the ballot with a few taps of a smartphone.
Give.GOP founder Paul Dietzel said efforts by national Republicans to adopt one online giving platform run counter to long-standing GOP beliefs in “free markets, equal opportunity and capitalism.”
Dietzel also is the CEO of another online donation company that Republicans have used, Anedot, and he likened the party’s top-down effort to socialism
“This sounds a lot like AOC, not the Republican Party,” he said, using the initials for outspoken New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who identifies as a democratic socialist.
Dietzel says his app will be used by state parties across the U.S. and by several GOP governors. He said it allows donors to split donations among multiple committees, points donors to similar candidates to whom they could give and will charge a smaller processing fee, allowing campaigns to keep a larger share of contributions.
A spokesman for WinRed did not respond to a request for comment Monday evening.
But Josh Holmes, a longtime adviser to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who was involved in the development of WinRed, questioned the wisdom of comparing Trump’s and other Republicans’ preference of a giving app to socialism.
“I don’t think it’s terrific for business to call President Trump a socialist,” Holmes said. “But that’s their business, not mine.”