Money, Money, Money, Money
BY Micah L. Sifry | Saturday, February 9 2008
The online fundraising war between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama has turned into a daily battle of the press releases, and it's hard to say for sure what the numbers truly mean.
Late yesterday, in response to Obama's $7.6 million haul post Super Tuesday, Clinton internet director Peter Daou put out word that Hillary had raised more than $9 million online since that day. Posting on Daily Kos, he wrote:
I wanted to give you an update on the campaign's fundraising over the past 72 hours.
The day after Super Tuesday, we set a goal of $3 million in 3 days, but broke through that target in less than 24 hours, raising over $4 million in the first day.
We then raised the goal to $6 million in 72 hours and quickly surpassed that.
As of this writing, since Super Tuesday, over 90,000 supporters have donated more than $9 million online.
We've now set a goal of $10 million <http://www.hillaryclinton.com/> and we are extremely gratified by the tremendous outpouring of support.
Earlier today Hillary spoke about some of the stories she's been hearing from her supporters.
Check out the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=llFvVVC2vJE
The speech is interesting because of how many of the anecdotes Clinton tells are about women rallying to her (along with one "crusty" Republican man). Also, she refers to 75,000 "new" donors, while Daou simply refers to 90,000 donors. Confused? You're not alone.
The Obama campaign said on Feb. 7th that it had amassed 300,000 donors to the campaign since the beginning of January (and set a new goal of 500,000). Again, it is not clear how many of these are new, as opposed to repeat donors.
Since neither campaign is releasing details, it's impossible to verify these numbers. As we've written in the past, not only is the line between traditional and online fundraising gone, the original implication of online donations--that they are measure of spontaneous support, rather than of asking-and-receiving, has completely been elided.
If the campaigns were to follow Ron Paul's model and open source their fundraising data, we could put this issue to rest, and find out, for example, how many of the donations they've tallied recently are from genuinely new donors and how many from support