The New 2020 Trend: Donating to Candidates You Won’t Vote For

Worried the next presidential debate will be too white, backers of Elizabeth Warren are giving to Julian Castro to keep his campaign alive

Democratic presidential candidate Julian Castro at CNN’s presidential town hall on October 10, 2019. Photo: Mario Tama/Getty

Julián Castro has a plea to voters: Help him raise $800,000 by October 31, or he will be forced to drop out of the Democratic presidential primary. The former Housing and Urban Development secretary says that without this funding, his campaign won’t be able to meet the polling cut-off for the next debate, on November 20. Castro, whose bid is a long shot to begin with, argues that losing his spot on the debate stage would make it unlikely that his campaign continues into the Iowa caucuses in February.

This isn’t the first time Castro’s campaign has warned the end could be near. (Desperate quarterly fundraising emails are their own political institution by now because they work.) Nevertheless, his plea elicited a rush of small donations — including some from people who say they have no interest in voting for him.

“My preferred candidate is Cory Booker,” says Lee Jolliffe, a journalism professor at Drake University in Iowa who says she’s donated around $40 to the Castro campaign. (Full information about donations this quarter won’t be available until January.) “But…