Thursday, April 26, 2012

Small Donor Spin

Small donor spin debunks some flap about a Romney press release. " The press release highlighted that '84% Of All Donations Received Through The End Of March Were $250 Or Less,' which seems to suggest a groundswell of grassroots support for the former governor."

"What the "84 percent" figure really means is that roughly 8 out of 10 checks received by the Romney campaign were $250 or less, not that 84% of the campaign's total fundraising came from checks of that size."

Fine, whatever. The article links to the CFI table Aggregated Individual Contributions by Donors to 2012 Presidential Candidates Cumulative through March 31, 2012 and that has more interesting data.

Obama has more donors, 167,597 than all Republican candidates combined, 164,199. While Romney had the most donors of any Republican, it was only 56,665.

If you want to look at amounts donated, 44% of Obama's donations were $200 or less while only 9% of Romney's were (and only 25% of all Republicans were). Only 16% of Obama's donators maxed out at $2,500 while 64% of Romney's were (and 40% of all Republican donations).

I guess it's obvious that the GOP is the party of the wealthy but I was happy to see that there are more people giving Obama money. I'd guess that if you're giving to the campaign, even a little, and assuming you're not giving to both sides (which I guess would be unlikely at $200 or under), you're going to vote for the candidate you've given to. It's even more striking realizing that through March Obama wasn't really campaigning there was no primary and the Republicans were going all out trying to pick a nominee. Maybe I'm wrong, but I found this all very encouraging.

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