Bias Disclosure: I'm a yellow-dog democrat, solid ABB, and presently backing Dean.
Just for fun, I did some back of the envelope calculations on fundraising capacity, spurred by thinking about the subscription donations on Dean's site. The big news? Predicted earnings of $240.8 million for Bush and $117.7 million for Dean.
First, what sort of donor pools are we looking at here?
Using US Census figures for 2001, ( PINC-11 2001) we have the following income distributions:
Total (Male/Female):
- 0-10K: 70508K (24412K/46096K)
- 10K-20K: 42546K (17904K/24642K)
- 20K-40K: 57108K (29732K/27376K)
- 40K-60K: 26576K (16640K/9936K)
- 60K-80K: 12007K (8274K/3733K)
- 80K-100K: 5097K (3821K/1276K)
- 100K+: 7748K (6129K/1619K)
Aside: reading these figures is quite interesting in and of itself. Check out particularly the gender imbalance, the "round salaries" factor and the overall rich/poor gap.
First consider a candidate (e.g. Bush) primarily dependent on $2000 donors. Who can give $2000? Since this is BOTE calculation, let's say anybody earning at least $100K per year. If Bush is shooting for $200 million, that means he needs 100,000 2K donors, or 1.29% of the populace.
Now consider a candidate (e.g. Dean) getting small monthly contributions. Using myself for a model, we'll assume that somebody earning $20K per year will give about $10 per month, for a total of $100 by the convention, or 0.5% of annual income, and that this scales up to (but not beyond) 100K: 10K donates $50, 40K donates $200, 60K donates $300, 80K donates $400. This is probably too conservative for the higher incomes, who have more disposable cash.
What percent of those will donate? If we assume that to a first approximation everyone in 100K+ is a Republican and 50% of the rest of the country are Democrats, then take Bush's fraction to assume that 0.65% of all 20-100K earners donate to Dean.
Finally, we'll use just the lowest income of each bracket for calculating the donations for that bracket. The final figures, then,
are:
- 0K: no donations
- 10K: 276K donors yielding $13.8 million
- 20K: 371K donors yielding $37.1 million
- 40K: 172K donors yielding $34.6 million
- 60K: 78K donors yielding $23.4 million
- 80K: 33K donors yielding $13.2 million
Interesting note: this predicts the average donor will give $131.2 dollars over the course of the campaign, an entirely reasonable sum given the average of $87.3 dollars per internet donor in Q3.
That's $122.1 million, well short of Bush's cool $200 million, which means that Dean needs to double base participation in order to match Bush.
Looking at it another way, what proportion of potential donors has each candidate currently tapped? For this, I turned to opensecrets.org. Bush currently has $84.5 million from donors, of which 30,000 are $2000 contributors, for $60 million total. That means Bush has tapped 30% of his 100K+ group for donations. Adding the remaining 70% and scaling in smaller donors gives him a campaign total of $281.6 million.
Dean currently has $25.4 million from donors, of which 1,554 are from $2000 contributors, for a total of $3.1 million. So the smaller donations are $22.3 million. Scaling Q3's online contributions of $7.4 million by 84.7K donors gets 255K small donors to date (assuming that the majority of $2K donors contribute offline during live events like dinners). This is 27% of the 930K donors available, a number surprisingly similar to Bush's pool-to-date. Since the current set of small donors can continue to donate, we can add them to the future donations as well, plus 73% untapped 2K donors yields an estimate of $8.4 million in big money and $104.9 million in small money, for a total of $113.3 million total.
So here's how I'm calling it: assuming no surprises between here and the election, $240.8 million for Bush and $117.7 million for Dean,based solely on the demographics of America and my loose BOTE calculations. If, on the other hand, Dean in fact has a significantly stronger message than Bush and thereby doubles or triples his numbers,
then he'll match Bush with doubling and utterly swamp him with tripling.