The first fundraising quarter ends tomorrow. We've talked about the importance of not only money, but also the number of contributors.

Many of us are interested in the number of contributors to get a rough estimate of how many people are vested in a particular campaign, and also for the more important task of democratizing/flattening fundraising.

In the next couple of weeks, some presidential campaigns may tout their "average" contribution amount in order to appear "grassroots." But this can be deceiving.

To give an oversimplified illustration, imagine that Candidate A collected $1 from nine people and $991 from one person. During the same quarter, Candidate B collects $100 contributions from ten people. Both candidates A and B have an average contribution sizes of $100. But these are very different candidates--Candidate A receives 99% of his money from a $991 contributor, and Candidate B receives 100% of her money from $100 contributors.

The more penetrating inquiry to determine the importance of smaller contributors to a campaign is to assess the percentage of a candidate's money that comes from contributions less than $200. Neither major party nominee did particularly well on this score in 2004. Bush received 69% of his money from individuals who gave over $200, and Kerry received 63% of his money from such individuals.

The percentage of its resources that a campaign collects from smaller contributors is important because smaller contributions are much more likely to reflect the economic diversity of America. A study from the 2000 election showed that American households earning less than $100,000 made up 86.6% of the general population. This group accounted for only for only 14% of the contributions over $200, but 73.5% of contributions of $100 or less.

The Campaign Finance Institute has a variety of interesting pages on first quarter presidential campaign contributions in previous cycles, including the all-time top first-quarter fundraisers (Gramm '95 at $13.5M, Gore '99 at $8.9M, and Bush '99 at $7.6M, Edwards '03 at $7.4M, and Kerry '03 at $7.0M). Note that one reason that the numbers will be much larger this year than in '95 and '99 is that the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 increased individual contributions from $1000 to $2000 and tied them to inflation, so that they are currently at $2300.