Since the New Hampshire polls closed Tuesday night, Bernie Sanders has raised more than $7 million — an incredible sum that’s the most his campaign has ever raised in one day.
Bernie Sanders’s remarkable small-donor fundraising should scare Hillary Clinton
Lucian Perkins /for The Washington Post via Getty
Andrew Prokop is a senior politics correspondent at Vox, covering the White House, elections, and political scandals and investigations. He’s worked at Vox since the site’s launch in 2014, and before that, he worked as a research assistant at the New Yorker’s Washington, DC, bureau.
Even more importantly, the average donation Sanders received in that period was around $34, according to his team. That means that the vast majority of those givers will be able to contribute many, many, many more times without running afoul of contribution limits.
Essentially, the Sanders campaign can mint money now. This latest bonanza just appeared because Sanders won New Hampshire and, in his victory speech, asked people to donate. There’s so much excitement about him that all he has to do is ask for cash and it pours in, with far less overhead costs compared with traditional fundraising events.
This is extremely consequential for how the Democratic contest will play out in the coming weeks and months. It guarantees that as long as Sanders’s small-donor army stays hyped up, he’ll be able to fund a national organization, pay for ads in every contested state, and remain in the race as long as he wants.
Could money troubles lie ahead for the Clinton campaign?
Hillary Clinton has no such advantage. Yes, she raised $40 million more than Sanders did in 2015, but the amount of money she actually had left in the bank — her cash on hand — was just $10 million more than Sanders had at the end of last year.
Crucially, Clinton’s fundraising relied mostly on large contributions — which means that unlike Sanders’s small-donor-heavy base, her givers are much more likely to hit the $2,700-per-person primary contribution limit and be barred from giving her any more cash afterward.
Clinton also raised much more of her cash through big-dollar fundraising events that have overhead costs — and that force the candidate and/or top staffers and surrogates to spend time off the campaign trail and in the major donor centers.
Indeed, there are signs that Clinton’s fundraising is already slowing. She only raised $15 million this January compared with Sanders’s $20 million, and this month’s numbers will likely be even more lopsided. And according to Politico’s Gabriel Debenedetti, Sanders spent three times more than Clinton on ads in the final two weeks of the New Hampshire primary.
Everything Clinton tries to do to stop Sanders might backfire on her
Furthermore, the nature of Sanders’s campaign and message — which is sharply critical of the influence of the superrich on politics — makes it difficult for Clinton, who doesn’t have anywhere near as strong a small donor base, to keep up with him in fundraising without it backfiring on her.
The traditional way many Democrats have raised campaign cash in recent decades is by having rich people, often from the finance industry, pay thousands of dollars to attend big fundraisers. Yet these cozy gatherings can look quite bad for Clinton in a primary where Sanders is saying she’s too close to moneyed interests. Indeed, after Sanders criticized a recent fundraiser Clinton held, she postponed two more planned finance industry–heavy fundraisers until after the New Hampshire primary.
Super PACs — outside groups that aren’t subject to campaign donor limits and can raise unlimited contributions — could also theoretically help Clinton’s operation close any fundraising gap that emerges. But relying on Super PAC money plays right into Sanders’s hands, seemingly vindicating his critique of the campaign finance system and giving him a new attack line to use on her.
Even the time-tested strategy for a campaign in trouble — going negative — could end up backfiring for Clinton and helping Sanders raise even more money. For instance, when Clinton’s team attacked Sanders’s support for single-payer health care last month, he quickly cited her attacks in a fundraising appeal blasted out to his supporters — and nearly $2 million poured in.
Clinton’s sole comforts might be, first, that traditional campaign spending hasn’t seemed to matter all that much this year, and second, that she at least will have enough cash to stay somewhat competitive with Sanders. Still, this isn’t a comfortable place for her to be, as she’s looking at a race that could last far longer than she had anticipated.
