Study: Many Obama Small Donors Really Weren’t

From the NYTimes Politics blog...

A new analysis of President-elect Barack Obama’s campaign fund-raising punctures one of the most enduring pieces of conventional wisdom from his presidential run — that small donors powered his record-breaking money machine.

The CFI's press release here, headlined "REALITY CHECK: Obama Received About the Same Percentage from Small Donors in 2008 as Bush in 2004".

#1 I think more rich people gave to Obama than people would have expected, because many rich people are also very intelligent (lawyers, medical doctors etc.) and were unhappy with the whole denigration of intellect by the republican party. If you are told over and over that only 'Joe the Plumber' is a real American and you are not because you have a degree from Harvard or live on the East Coast or live in a city etc etc , you start thinking: "Why should I give these guys any of my money ?".

There was some op-ed in NY Times about this by Brooks (?), but I can't find it. But I remember it stated that even investment bankers are now overwhelmingly vote for Democrats, because most of them live on the Coasts and are educated, and didn't feel welcomed by the Republican party anymore since they did not fit the profile of "Joe Sixpack". Having said that, I suspect even Joe Sixpack voted for Obama.

I think it was Brooks and I think he followed it by saying, "you have to work hard to be a Republican and alienate investment bankers.

Tmes they do change, or they are a' changin'...blowin' in the winds?

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/10/opinion/10brooks.html

>1 Jesse_wiedinmyer:

I found that quite interesting. I wonder if we should also reexamine the general sense that Obama ran a campaign that leveraged the internet in startling new ways. I had very much bought into that notion, but I also would not have doubted Obama had tapped small-money donors in an entirely new way--which he clearly did not. Did he just run a very effective largely traditional campaign?

What I don't understand is that if McCain-Finegold was supposed to lock the Republicans into the money while keeping the Democrats out (Bush would not have signed it if it didn't), how it all turned out so badly for the Republicans?

>7 geneg:

The House vote was 198 Democrats and 41 Republicans in favor, with 12 Democrats and 176 Republicans against!

I wonder if we should also reexamine the general sense that Obama ran a campaign that leveraged the internet in startling new ways.

There has been some talk in conjunction with the article that one of the reasons that many of these people were repeat donors is that the Obama campaign was able to follow up with emails and the like much more efficiently than others.

"running a campaign that leverages the Internet" is hard to distinguish from "being popular among people who live half their lives online" :)

I find the whole press release odd.

They don't refute but instead document that Obama got a disproportionate number of under $200 contributions, they simply gloss this with the idea that may people gave multiple times making them, in the end, mid-size or large instead of small donors.

This just emphasizes the beauty of Obama's fundraising approach. He got a high level of commitment from a lot of people over a long period of time; this made a lot of ordinary Americans who haven't traditionally been financial supporters good sized financial supporters, resulting in a massive amount of fundraising. The sheer number of donors say good things about participation and democracy.

Our household contributed to Obama on multiple occasions. We'd never contributed to a national campaign before. All told, we probably gave a hundred dollars. I'm sure there were households who never contributed before and contributed several hundred dollars, such is the love for BushCo.

This is the first year we gave any money to a political candidate, and we did so numerous times, usually around $50 a pop.

>11 A_musing:

Well, no, the point is that the percentage of donors under $200 was roughly on par with past efforts, and that the average amounts for these donors was also. Obama did very well—he raised a lot of money—and there were proportionally more of every type, but, until now, it was widely though that Obama hadn't merely raised a lot of money, he raised it in a different way.

He raised it in a very different way.

See No. 13.

That's not how money was raised in the past. There were some direct mail donors who gave repeatedly - but because of high fundraising costs, they didn't have a huge impact, and so didn't get chased very hard, and their total number of gifts per cycle might average between 2 and 3.

So who ever said the percentage of donations changed? As the press release makes clear when read carefully, the Obama claims were that their campaign was fueled by many small donations - and it was.

This is the approach of disputing A by saying "clearly not B" - huh?

So who ever said the percentage of donations changed?

Well, the CFI for one.

That's why they're issuing a correction of their previous statements.