Sanders Says He Had Campaign Best $25 Million Haul in January
Sanders Says He Had Campaign Best $25 Million Haul in January
(Bloomberg) -- After raising $25 million in January, Bernie Sanders is ready to kick his campaign spending into high gear, planning big expenditures in Super Tuesday states.
The Vermont senator had his single best fundraising month to date, his campaign said, with more than 648,000 individuals, including 219,000 first-time givers, making over 1.3 million donations. By comparison, in the last three months of 2019, the campaign took in $34.4 million, an average of $11.5 million a month.
The cash infusion will allow Sanders to add staff in Super Tuesday states while putting $5.5 million toward television and digital ads in 10 states, including expanded buys in delegate-rich California and Texas. His campaign said it would begin advertising in eight new states: Arkansas, Colorado, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Utah.
“Bernie’s multiracial, multi generational, people-driven movement for change is fueling 2020’s most aggressive campaign for president,” Sanders’ campaign manager Faiz Shakir said in a statement. “Working class Americans giving $18 at a time are putting our campaign in a strong position to compete in states all over the map.”
The small-dollar donor base has been critical to Sanders’s success, allowing him to raise more money -- $96 million in 2019 -- than any of his Democratic rivals, and those donors continued to support him in January. The most common occupation they listed was “teacher.” The five most common employers listed were Amazon.com Inc., Starbucks Corp., Walmart Inc., the United States Postal Service and Target Corp.
The average donation size was $18.72.
The January haul came before Sanders’s strong showing in Iowa, where the current count has him in a virtual tie with Pete Buttigieg. The former South Bend, Indiana, mayor had 26.2% of state delegate equivalents, barely edging Sanders’s 26.1%, with 97% of more than 1,700 precincts reporting results.
Sanders is currently leading in the RealClearPolitics average for New Hampshire, which votes on Tuesday.
Presidential candidates report their fundraising totals monthly in election years, with detailed disclosures on contributors and expenditures due at the Federal Election Commission on Feb. 20.
(Disclaimer: Michael Bloomberg is seeking the Democratic presidential nomination. He is the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News.)
To contact the reporter on this story: Bill Allison in Washington DC at ballison14@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Wendy Benjaminson at wbenjaminson@bloomberg.net, John Harney, Jon Herskovitz
©2020 Bloomberg L.P.