Obviously, all those emails worked! The Obama campaign is touting that it is close to reaching one million individual donors to the president’s re-election effort. More precisely, they’ve reported garnering 766,000 donations from 606,000 people in the July-September fundraising quarter, which is on top of 680,000 donations that they received from 552,000 people in the April-June quarter. Some people who gave in that earlier period obviously have given again in this quarter, which explains why they haven’t topped a million unique individuals yet.
These numbers are certainly impressive, and they exceed by several multiples the number of donors and donations amassed by each of the Republican presidential candidates so far. Not surprisingly, the Obama campaign is also trying to emphasize how much this million-donor number proves that they have a big small-donor grassroots base. Here’s a post from National Finance Director Rufus Gifford specifically calling out the New York Times for having earlier reported that the campaign was having trouble energizing its small donor base.
Since the detailed report has yet to be released, we don’t yet have a complete breakdown of how much of this money is coming in truly small (i.e., under $200) amounts. But as I have argued before, this should be taken as only one measure of how grassroots–or grassrootsy–a campaign really is.
October 14, 2011