Legal Commentary

Hillary Raises $7.4 Million Online Since Super Tuesday

By Jeralyn

Mark Penn, in a conference call tonight (audio here) says Hillary has raised $7.4 million online since the polls closed on Super Tuesday from 40,000 plus contributors.

Matt Stoller at Open Left writes about the phenomemal support, and says it comes mostly from suburban women. I don't know if that's true, I can't find a link. The last campaign contribution link I looked out which was updated 1/31/08 showed more campaign contributions to Hillary from men than women. (I've lost the link and can't find it now. It said something about gender being determined as closely as possible from FEC information.) But I agree with Matt on this:

It's remarkable, because it is converting voters and supporters into activists and donors, only it's probably not the creative class anymore. Clinton, like Dean, became an underdog, a real underdog, with more public support than Village support, and her public directly responded over the internet to close this gap.

In other words, the Obama campaign has had a strategy of cultivating online donors and activists, they know how to do it, and they are very good at it. The Clinton campaign has not done any of this particularly well because it hasn't been their strategy. And somehow, they are at rough parity over the last 48 hours.

Curiously, Obama's site is not broadcasting dollars raised, only the number of donations. Its goal is 500,000 donors by March 4.

Bottom line: There's a lot of Democrats giving money this election cycle. They want their White House back and they're willing to shell out to get it.

Full post as published by TalkLeft on February 08, 2008 (boomark / email).