Barack Obama's "Small Donors" Urban (Chicago) Legend

"Barack Obama's fundraising and the small donor myth" from US News reports that another urban legend from the Barack Obama campaign has been its predominant fundraising coming from small donors - when in fact it was fueled mostly from big donors and bundlers, according to a study by the Campaign Finance Institute.

The study found that 49 percent of the contributions Obama received were for under $200; this is the number underlying the claim that Obama had a revolutionary number of small donors. (The like figure was 32 percent for John McCain, 37 percent for John Kerry, and 31 percent for George W. Bush in 2004.) But the study also shows that the percentage of donors giving a total of less than $200 was not dramatically different from that of McCain, Bush, or Kerry.

To wit: 26 percent of Obama donors gave a total of less than $200, which is only a hair more than the 25 percent who gave that amount to George W. Bush in 2004. (McCain: 21 percent, Kerry: 20 percent—I wonder if going further back, one would find a correlation between "winning" in this category and winning the popular presidential vote.)

Obama distinguished himself in the medium- and large-donor categories. Donors totaling $201-$999 accounted for 27 percent of Obama donors (McCain: 20 percent, Kerry: 24 percent, Bush: 13 percent) and donors giving a total of $1,000 or more made up 47 percent of Obama's patrons (McCain: 59 percent, Kerry: 56 percent, Bush: 60 percent).So, good for him in that regard.

Comments

[Carlos Navarro]

The question now arises: The so-called small donors who contributed repeatedly up to the $4,600 legal limit in small increments of $200 or less, did they contribute their own money or was the money channeled through them by the super rich with a stake in the outcome of the election? It's hard to believe that the average American, struggling to stay financially afloat in this hard times, could afford to make campaign contributions of any size.