Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, and now Beto
O’Rourke have reported very large multi-million dollar fund-raising totals for
the opening weeks and more of their campaigns, and all of them racked up these
amounts from scores of thousands of small dollar donors. In 2016, there was a sharp contrast between
Clinton’s old-style reliance on big money donors and bundlers and Bernie’s
reliance famously on donors averaging $27 a pop. This time around, all the early serious
candidates are going the Bernie route.
This is politically important for many reasons, none of which I have to
detail here as all of us, I assume, are aware of them. But there is one point that may be missed.
Modern American political campaigns are not actually very
expensive. A presidential campaign these
days can easily cost one billion dollars.
That is $100 each from ten million donors. $100 is what a night at the movies costs for
a family of four, by the time you add in the nachos and the super-sized drinks. It is 5% of what Americans spend on Valentine’s
Day. If the present ground level
enthusiasm on the Democratic side persists, the leading candidates will have no
trouble raising enough money to carry on through the primaries, nor will the
nominee lack for funds to wage a full-scale campaign.
1 comment:
Just read some of a long and very critical piece on Buttigieg by Nathan Robinson at the outlet Current Affairs. Stopped reading about halfway through. Robinson makes some telling points, though the tone is a bit overly prosecutorial, I think. I'd say Buttigieg is a long-shot at best to get the nomination, so I'm not sure whether this extensive critique is even necessary at this point. (Plus, in fairness Robinson should now go on to do comparably detailed examinations of the other candidates.)
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