Obama’s and Edwards’ fundraising in excellent shape
Obama’s got over 100,000 donations and 83,000 people giving. Wow. Edwards clocked in a 37,000 donors and raised just over $3 million. Hillary is not making her totals public - good thing to remember come votin’ time. Jerome Armstrong over at MyDD writes about both Obama and Edwards fundraising, and in particular the number of donors that both campaigns are getting. An excerpted Obama / Dean comparison…
In 2003, Howard Dean’s 1st quarter contributions came from more than 12,000 individual donors. Obama’s at over 70,000 contributors. I don’t think most people would see that as a realistic comparison though, as Dean’s campaign was still a blip on the radar until March of ‘03, so I went and looked at Dean’s second quarter of 2003. Dean had over 73,000 contributors, so roughly about the same as Obama, so we can use this for the sake of comparison.
Also interesting in the Edwards post is the focus on Edwards’ adoption of ActBlue for all his fundraising. Obama and Hillary are using custom or proprietary software. Excerpted here…
That Edwards is using ActBlue to process his contributions is more than symbolic, as those resources are actually what will help to build the progressive netroots movement for the coming election cycles. When I was working on Warner’s effort, we were also using ActBlue, but I think it would have been a tough barrier to cross to adopt the level of transparency that Edwards has done.
Everyone’s spinning for their own side (I’m pretty sure that Armstrong is in the Edwards camp). But it is true that Obama has not become the Internet candidate like Edwards has, and I think that’s about Edwards supreme focus on movement and infrastructure building for the left. Obama is truly bi-partisan, and rejects making sycophantic decisions to reward his political allies. I’m not decided on who will get my vote, but it might be the case that Edwards is the better primary candidate and Obama is the better general election candidate.
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