http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/24/study-obamas-small-donors-really-werent/ November 24, 2008, 1:34 pm Study: Many Obama Small Donors Really Weren’t By Michael Luo
A new analysis of President-elect Barack Obama’s campaign fund-raising punctures one of the most enduring pieces of conventional wisdom from his presidential run — that small donors powered his record-breaking money machine.
The study, released today by the Campaign Finance Institute, a non-partisan group, goes deeper than previous analyses of Mr. Obama’s fund-raising in examining donors who made discrete contributions of $200 or less, and found many of them donated repeatedly to exceed that amount.
The institute found that while nearly 50 percent of Mr. Obama’s donations came in individual contributions of $200 or less, in reality, only 26 percent of the money he collected through Aug. 31 during the primary and 24 percent of his money through Oct. 15 came from contributors whose total donations added up to $200 or less. The data is the most recent available.
Those figures are actually in the same range as the 25 percent President Bush raised in 2004 from donors whose contributions aggregated to $200 or less, the 20 percent Senator John F. Kerry collected from such donors and Senator John McCain’s 21 percent from the same group. Meanwhile, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton collected just 13 percent from such donors during her run but former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean brought in 38 percent of his donations from small donors fitting this description.
“They myth is that money from small donors dominated Barack Obama’s finances,” said Michael J. Malbin, the institute’s executive director in a statement. “The reality of Obama’s fund-raising was impressive, but the reality does not match the myth.”
Nevertheless, when it comes to large donors who gave $1,000 or more in aggregate to Mr. Obama, they still accounted for a smaller proportion of his total money haul than others. Contributions from such large donors accounted for 47 percent of his money through August 31, compared to 56 percent for Mr. Kerry, 60 percent for President Bush and 59 percent for Senator John McCain.
Other interesting findings by the institute: about 403,000 people out of the three million donors announced by the Obama campaign gave $200 or more, forcing the campaign to disclose them in Federal Election Commission records; 212,000 started off by giving $200 or less but only about 13,000 wound up giving $1,000 or more; Mr. Obama received about 80 percent money from large donors, defined as those who gave $1,000 or more, than from small donors who gave $200 or less.
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