I get emails from the Clinton campaign:
Wow, Markos -- more than 800,000 people have chipped in to support this campaign. I think that’s just incredible. I know it doesn’t fit with the media narrative, but we’re building quite a movement here, and we’ve already brought home our first two wins.
Bernie Sanders:
Altogether, Sanders’ grassroots campaign to date has received more than 4 million contributions
If you notice, the two campaigns are reporting different things at this time: The number of donors versus the number of donations. Since they don’t have to report small donations to the FEC, they can cherrypick the numbers that look best for them. You can bet the Clinton campaign would be touting individual donations if those numbers came anywhere near Bernie Sanders’. Meanwhile, Sanders is going for the bigger number (donations) because those are impressive looking numbers!
The Sanders campaign reported 1.3 million individual donors back on January 31, so he’s still far outpacing Hillary Clinton on this important metric. But regardless, both campaigns are seeing a dramatic uptick in fundraising now that people have actually started voting.
I’ve pieced together these numbers from news reports, so they are only as accurate as the sources I could find, and since they all quote from campaign sources, only as accurate as the campaign surrogate making the claim. No one outside one of these campaign will ever audit these claims.
Bernie Sanders
| Date |
Donors |
Donations |
| February 21 |
1.5 million |
4 million |
| January 31 |
1.3 million |
3.25 million
|
| January 3 |
1 million |
2.5 million |
| December 17 |
??? |
2 million |
| October 1 |
650,000 |
1.3 million |
| May 5 |
75,000 |
??? |
Hillary Clinton
| DATE |
DONORS |
DONATIONS |
| FEBRUARY 22 |
800,000 |
??? |
| February 16 |
750,000 |
??? |
| February 4 |
670,000 |
??? |
Now if you wonder why I couldn’t find anything before February 4 for Clinton, it’s because until that point, they were happy to report only their toplines results. And in any case, if they reported the number of donors, simple math would reveal just how dominant their big-dollar donor base was. On the other hand, Sanders’ toplines weren’t that great, so reporting the number of donors and donations was the more impressive bet, and reinforced his narrative of a people-powered campaign.
Those donor/donation numbers still look awesome for the Sanders campaign, and still kick the Clinton camp’s ass, so they’re sticking with them, even as their toplines surpass Clinton’s. Meanwhile, the Clinton campaign realized that 1) their big-dollar donors were maxed out, so they needed to expand their base, and 2) the narrative looked terrible for them—the optics of being funded by the wealthy didn’t play well in a Democratic primary. So they’ve since shifted to an aggressive effort to bolster their small-dollar base.
That makes perfect sense. They obviously hope to catch up to the Sanders campaign at some point, and even if they don’t, they finally have a donor base they can continue to work for new donations (much as the Sanders campaign is doing). That’s why they’re still unwilling to release the number of individual donations, even as their number of individual donors increases.
Meanwhile, Clinton hasn’t quit her schedule of high-dollar fundraisers, so for them, it’s an all-of-the-above strategy. Will it be enough to beat Sanders at this game? Doubtful. She’d do better to quit that big-dollar shit to focus on more voter interaction and motivation. But she is who she is.
For Sanders, he now enters a part of the calendar that looks brutal for him. South Carolina offers him little succor, and the bulk of the March 1 Super Tuesday states favor Clinton on paper. Much of his ability to last deeper into the primary season will depend on if his donors continue to give, even after suffering the first real setbacks of the campaign season.
As of now, he and his supporters have outperformed all expectations. They’ve passed the early tests. But even bigger ones are ahead.
