First, Hillary co-opted Bernie's positions on the TPP, Keystone, and DOMA. Since then she has spent much of the Democratic debates promoting the idea that she and her rivals are pretty much on the same page, so she's really just running against the Republicans. Hillary’s strategy seems to be to try and blur the lines between herself and her opponents, while subtly reinforcing the inevitability of her candidacy. But now comes a new twist: She’s trying to portray her campaign as a Sanders-style grassroots juggernaut funded mostly by small donors. Well, it's not.
Hillary rolled out this theme in the second debate, stating "I have hundreds of thousands of donors, most of them small." In the third matchup she doubled down, declaring:
I think it's important to point out that about 3% of my donations come from people in the finance and investment world. You can go to opensecrets.org and check that. I have more donations from students and teachers than I do from people associated with Wall Street.
She’s referring to a website run by the good people at the Center for Responsive Politics, who take data reported to the Federal Election Commission, break it down, and present it in user-friendly form. There's just one problem: opensecrets.org gives an account of the Clinton campaign that is almost the polar opposite of what Hillary is saying.
This is a composite of two graphics from opensecrets.org that compare small versus large donors. (A small donation is defined as less than $200.) As you can see, 81% of Hillary's money came from large donors, compared to 22% for Bernie.
Did most of Hillary's contributions come from small donors? Technically, yes. But almost any politician can make that claim, so long as they deliberately confuse the number of contributions with the relative size of those contributions. For instance, if three women each donated $50 to your campaign, and one hedge fund manager donated $500,000, then you could say that the majority of your donors were small donors. But of course you don't have dinner with the three women, and you don't take their calls. You have dinner with the hedge fund manager, and from that point on, he has you on speed dial. Again, the bottom line is that 81% of Hillary's money has come from big donors, versus 22% for Bernie.
I don't really like to criticize Hillary, and neither does Bernie. I'll even give her credit for basically debunking herself by encouraging people to visit opensecrets.org. But let's face it: claiming that her campaign is chiefly funded by students, teachers, and just plain ordinary folks is misleading at best.
It's pretty basic stuff, really. I think that just about anyone can understand the significance of these numbers, regardless of whether they know the TPP from the DNC. This is not an attempt, as Hillary might say, to impugn her integrity. Nor is some baseless internet meme. It is simply one way to judge the candidates based on facts, rather than personalities or promises. And it illustrates quite clearly the difference between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.