Sometime today, I presume, the Obama campaign will reveal its total fundraising haul for the month of February, and everyone will go gaga. Whatever the actual number–$35 million is the low estimate (which would match the Clinton campaign’s take), $70 million is Republican consultant and techPresident blogger Patrick Ruffini’s plausible prediction (which would be nearly six times John McCain’s reported February income)–it’s important to put this into more dramatic perspective.
In 2004, when the total US population was about 296 million, the total number of donors giving $200 or more to all federal campaigns and committees–that is, to all presidential and congressional candidates, PACs and party committees–was 1,140,535, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. That is, about .4% of the US population made a contribution of more than $200.
In 2000, when the total population was about 281 million, just 777,877 made a $200+ contribution, just over one-quarter of one-percent of the population.
Barack Obama’s campaign has already mobilized more individual donors than the entire large donor pool of 2000, and they are closing rapidly on the entire large donor pool of 2004. This is breathtaking.
Obviously, this is not an apples-to-apples comparison, because when Obama reports having topped one million individual donors, the bulk of his givers are so-called “small donors” because the amounts they have donated are under $200 and therefore do not have to be itemized individually when reported to the FEC.
And it doesn’t mean that Obama is completely free of being dependent on large donors and the well-connected bundlers who still amount for the bulk of actual dollars raised by presidential campaigns. To give you some perspective, in 2004, the 884,000 donors who gave between $200 and $1999 produced a total of $513 million. The much smaller group of 231,000 who gave $2000 or more, produced a total of $756 million. Big money still matters a lot, and that’s why it’s very important to pay close attention to the bundlers and the monied interests pouring large sums into all the presidential campaigns.
But Obama’s million-plus individual donors should be seen as marking two significant changes in American politics. First, we’re living through a major upsurge in public participation in politics–and the Internet is a big engine of that surge. Second, a candidate with a million-plus individual donors–90% of whom at this point have given something like $100 on average–has the potential to more independent of monied interests than any in the past. It’s too soon to say if Obama will live up to that potential–indeed, it’s too soon to say if he will be the Democratic nominee–but whatever happens I suspect that a year from now we’ll look back on this day and note that it marked an inflection point in how technology is changing politics.