The latest news on the Democratic fundraising front is this:
* The Clinton campaign announced today that, since Super Tuesday, it had raised $10 million online from more than 100,000 donors. Campaign internet director Peter Daou said in a press release that “”This is a major development in this race. Hillary has always had millions of strong supporters nationwide — now those supporters are beginning to give online in large numbers.” I asked him this afternoon if these were first-time or repeat donors, and he told me, “Virtually all of it is from new donors.”
* Late yesterday, Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton put out word that “We’ve raised well more than the Clinton campaign this month but more importantly is how we have raised it, from hundreds of thousands of donors who are also forming the backbone of a potent grassroots movement for change.” The Obama campaign did not offer an update on its $7.6 million fundraising haul from Super Tuesday to last Friday, but it did put up a new online tracker showing that it was well on its way to its goal of 500,000 donors by March 4th. The tracker shows 374,896 donors so far, as of 4:22pm EST today. (Click on that link to get an update–right now it’s rising by 1,000 an hour.) How many are new donors? In January, the campaign said that 170,000 of its 2008 donors were new donors. On February 8th, it announced that it had received donations from 300,000 donors, but didn’t offer a breakdown. If, for argument’s sake, Obama’s donations have been coming in at a steady flow since the beginning of the year, that would mean a weekly pace of about 60,000 donors a week thru February 8th. For January then, that would suggest perhaps 250,000 total donors, with 170,000 or 68% of them new. Extrapolating forward, if the Obama campaign is attracting new donors at the same pace, they probably have gained 80,000 new donors in all since January. If anything, their February number of new donors is probably closer to Clinton’s 100,000, since Obama is already claiming at least 73,000 fresh donations since Super Tuesday.
If these jumps in new donor support seem surprising, keep in mind that since the beginning of January, every measure of public interest in the campaign that we’ve been tracking has jumped accordingly. On Facebook, for example, Obama’s “friends” have rocketed from about 180,000 to more than 460,000, while Clinton’s have risen, albeit at a slower pace, from about 55,000 to 107,000. Same with organic conversation about the major candidates in the blogosphere: prior to January daily mentions of Obama and Clinton each hovered in a range between 1,000 and 3,500 a day; since then they’ve rarely fallen below 2,500 a day and peaked a couple of times at more than 15,000. In essence, a lot of voters just started tuning in around the Iowa caucuses, and since then it looks like both campaigns have been doing a great job converting interest into support.