Beto O’Rourke announced additional details Wednesday about the massive fundraising haul in the first day of his presidential campaign, showing that while he may have beat rival Bernie Sanders in total money raised, Sanders had the advantage in two key metrics.
After a campaign stop here, O’Rourke told reporters that he received “more than 128,000 unique contributions” in the first 24 hours, with an average donation size of $47. O’Rourke’s campaign later corrected the average donation size, saying it was actually $48. By comparison, Sanders’ campaign said its first-day haul came from over 223,000 individual donors for an average contribution size of $27.
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O’Rourke first announced Monday that he had raised $6.1 million in the opening 24 hours of his campaign. That figure was $5.9 million for Sanders.
The difference in averages actually is more significant than one would initially think.
Think about the case of Jeff Bezos walking into a bar.
On average, everyone in the bar would now be a billionaire.
We already have reports of big money bundlers raising Wall Street cash for Beto, so it’s not unreasonable to surmise that most of his money came from (perhaps) 10% of his donors.
This means two things: His support is not broad, and his donors may already be running into campaign finance law limits on donations.