Donations to Sanders’ People Powered Campaign Top 2 Million
WASHINGTON – Sen. Bernie Sanders’ supporters have made presidential campaign history by donating more than 2 million times to his campaign for the Democratic Party nomination.
“Over 2 million contributions have been made to the only campaign that rejects a corrupt campaign finance system,” Sanders says in a television and Internet advertisement entitled People Power. “You can’t level the playing field with Wall Street banks and billionaires by taking their money,” Sanders adds in the new message.
In a statement, Sanders thanked his supporters. “What our vision of a political revolution has already accomplished is to show that we can run a strong and we believe winning campaign without a super PAC, without contributions from millionaires and billionaires,” Sanders said. “We are enormously proud that we have received more individual contributions at this point in the campaign than any candidate who is not an incumbent president. As the campaign continues to succeed, we expect those numbers to grow exponentially.”
More than $3 million was raised since an online push was launched on Monday to top 2 million donations. Of that total, about $1.6 million has been raised since Wednesday alone.
The average donation to Sanders this week has been about $20 as many of the more than 800,000 donors were showing their financial support for a second or third time. Just 261 Sanders backers have given the maximum allowable contribution of $2,700, accounting for a mere 1.7 percent of his campaign's total reported money raised. That’s a sharp contrast to Hillary Clinton’s 17,575 maxed-out donors, whose donations accounted for almost 62 percent of her money raised, according to Federal Election Commission records for the first three quarters of this year.
No other candidate who is not a sitting president ever received 2 million donations by this point in a White House campaign. Then Sen. Barack Obama had surpassed 1 million donations to his first campaign for president by the time of the 2008 Iowa caucuses. In his run for a second term, reports indicated Obama receiving around 2.2 million contributions by the end of 2011, a figure Sanders still could surpass.
