As I suspected, the “Hillary raised $10 million online overnight” report that the Washington Post ran with earlier today was too good to be true. I don’t know if the mistake is the reporter’s or if someone at Camp Hillary was spinning a bit too fast, but there’s no way they raised that much since her win in Pennsylvania yesterday.
An email from Terry McAuliffe, Clinton campaign chairman, that I received three hours ago, says “More than 50,000 people have contributed to the campaign for the very first time in the last 24 hours alone.” If 80% of Clinton’s donations are from new givers, that implies a total number of about 60,000 donations. If we’re very generous and assume an average donation of $100, which is high for first-time donors, that gives Clinton a current take of at most $6 million.
Reading the Post’s report from its Trail blog, which was by Matthew Mosk, it looks like the over-spin came from Hassan Nemazee, a finance co-chair for Clinton and longtime Democratic fatcat. A Google search shows Nemazee fed the same line to Business Week, which cited him for the news that Clinton supposedly took in $10 million by 2pm this afternoon.
Why am I bothering to knock this particular claim down to size? Because 90% of politics is about perception, and if a campaign is perceived to be running out of money, or floating in money, that affects what other people will think and do about it. Internet-driven fundraising is an amazing thing, because the costs are so low and the speed so seemingly instantaneous. But anyone who reports on it should be careful to remember that the campaigns can easily hype these numbers, and by the time anyone checks for the truth it won’t matter.
The same is true, by the way, for the Obama campaign, as Patrick Ruffini has shown that the Obama campaign’s online widget showing its donor total has occasionally behaved in odd ways. The best solution to this problem of verifiability, and the lack thereof, would be real-time donation transparency, as was practiced by the Ron Paul campaign. Unfortunately, that’s hardly likely from a major campaign any time soon.
[If you’re reading this story because of a link from the HuffPost or Fark.com, I’ve updated my reporting here. It looks like Clinton did rake in $10M as of sometime late yesterday, based on a claimed total of 100,000 donations since Tuesday night.}
April 23, 2008