Bernie Sanders Dominates With Small Donors, While the GOP Rakes in the Dark Money
Bernie Sanders Dominates With Small Donors, While the GOP Rakes in the Dark Money
Joshua Holland
The Nation
Sanders is dominating all other candidates among small donors, which could give him a marked advantage as the primary continues. Almost three-quarters of his haul this quarter came from donors giving $200 or less, and the campaign told the Huffington Post that only 270 of his nearly 700,000 donors—less than half of 1 percent—have given the maximum individual contribution of $2,700 for the primary. That means that Sanders can go back to his donor base repeatedly as the race progresses.
In a remarkable piece of reporting for The New York Times last week, Nicholas Confessore, Sarah Cohen and Karen Yourish shed some light on the fattest of fat-cat donors through the first two quarters of this year. Their analysis found that just 358 families, and the corporations they controlled, donated well over half of the money in this election cycle, mostly through Super PACs, and “the vast majority” of that cash went to Republicans.
If this trend continues through the 2016 cycle—with Democrats leading the GOP in direct campaign contributions while a relatively small number of large donors fund Republican Super PACs—it will set up an interesting dynamic. Super PACs can raise vast sums of money without disclosing their donors, but they also come with certain disadvantages for a campaign. While the rules against campaigns coordinating with their outside groups are hardly being enforced, the PACs can’t pay for campaign infrastructure—things like staff, offices, or a candidate’s travel. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker learned this lesson the hard way, dropping out of the race with little money in his campaign coffers, although his goofily named Unintimidated PAC had raised $20 million, second only to Jeb Bush’s.
And while they can blanket the airwaves with ads, broadcast media also charge Super PACs a premium for advertising time, sometimes getting up to four times as much as they did from campaigns directly during the 2012 cycle, according to Bloomberg Business.