Show Us Some Real Money, Hillary!
By Micah L. Sifry, 04/23/2008 - 9:54pm

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As I suspected, the "Hillary raised $10 million online overnight" report that the Washington Post ran with earlier today was too good to be true. I don't know if the mistake is the reporter's or if someone at Camp Hillary was spinning a bit too fast, but there's no way they raised that much since her win in Pennsylvania yesterday.

An email from Terry McAuliffe, Clinton campaign chairman, that I received three hours ago, says "More than 50,000 people have contributed to the campaign for the very first time in the last 24 hours alone." If 80% of Clinton's donations are from new givers, that implies a total number of about 60,000 donations. If we're very generous and assume an average donation of $100, which is high for first-time donors, that gives Clinton a current take of at most $6 million.

Reading the Post's report from its Trail blog, which was by Matthew Mosk, it looks like the over-spin came from Hassan Nemazee, a finance co-chair for Clinton and longtime Democratic fatcat. A Google search shows Nemazee fed the same line to Business Week, which cited him for the news that Clinton supposedly took in $10 million by 2pm this afternoon.

Why am I bothering to knock this particular claim down to size? Because 90% of politics is about perception, and if a campaign is perceived to be running out of money, or floating in money, that affects what other people will think and do about it. Internet-driven fundraising is an amazing thing, because the costs are so low and the speed so seemingly instantaneous. But anyone who reports on it should be careful to remember that the campaigns can easily hype these numbers, and by the time anyone checks for the truth it won't matter.

The same is true, by the way, for the Obama campaign, as Patrick Ruffini has shown that the Obama campaign's online widget showing its donor total has occasionally behaved in odd ways. The best solution to this problem of verifiability, and the lack thereof, would be real-time donation transparency, as was practiced by the Ron Paul campaign. Unfortunately, that's hardly likely from a major campaign any time soon.

[If you're reading this story because of a link from the HuffPost or Fark.com, I've updated my reporting here. It looks like Clinton did rake in $10M as of sometime late yesterday, based on a claimed total of 100,000 donations since Tuesday night.}

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The Red Truck

On the Fred Thompson campaign, late in the game we were raising less money than we needed to make a substantial TV buy in Iowa and then South Carolina. The decision was made to deploy the eCampaign's idea of the "Red Truck" flash animation. Todd Zeigler discussed this previously.

http://www.bivingsreport.com/2008/does-good-design-matter-an-anecdote-fr...

Once live, our online fundraising was fully transparent. The flash piece automatically pulled the fundraising numbers directly from our database in almost real time. The only reason it wasn't fully real time was because of our hosting situation. We ran the main site on a 3 server cluster; and we ran into an issue with the animation pulling numbers from different servers. Thus, if you sat and hit the refresh button constantly you might get slightly different numbers for a few seconds.

By Austin Walne at Thu, 04/24/2008 - 8:23am | login or register to post comments

The 60,000 donors was true as of noon

I just wanted to offer some corrections to your piece. If you respond to my email, I can get you copies of the original email.

Hillary was on track to raise $10 million within 24 hours. The press release that went out said that by 12pm on the 23rd (yesterday), the campaign had received 60,000 donations w/ 50,000 new donors.

The email you received from Terry was a mass email that started to go out yesterday afternoon, so it is very likely that you got the email after that mark was reached, and with information that was only specific to the number of donors by noon on Wednesday. I'm not sure if the mass email from Terry made specific that this was as of noon yesterday, but here's the update that came from the campaign:

Clinton Campaign on Track to Raise $10 Million Online in the 24 Hrs Since Winning PA Primary

Historic fundraising pace represents campaign’s best day ever

Hillary Clinton’s campaign is on track to raise $10 million online in the 24 hours since she was declared the winner of the Pennsylvania primary last night.

“Senator Clinton’s game-changing victory last night has turned the tide and resulted in an historic outpouring of grassroots support,” said Campaign Chairman Terry McAuliffe. “Just like Hillary, our supporters have met every challenge and come through each time. Thanks to them, we will have the resources needed to compete and win as we move ahead to the next contests.”

In addition, the campaign has received support from over 60,000 donors through noon today, of whom approximately 50,000 are new donors.

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By Xavier Lopez-Ayala at Thu, 04/24/2008 - 9:43am | login or register to post comments

It might be worthwhile to check out HRC's 2/5 claims

On the night of Super Tuesday and in the day or two after, the Clinton camp made very similar claims of fundraising success. Leading up to 2/5, they were in much the same trouble fiscally as they are now. Did their claims on 2/5 match the results when they filed their 1st quarter numbers? If not, that's good reason to be skeptical here.

I'd bet it wouldn't be too hard to have called a bunch of Hillary supporters (volunteers who hadn't donated, donors who hadn't maxed out) a week before the PA primary and ask for pledges should she prove her mettle in PA. Mass calls/e-mails to those people after the nets call it for her, funneling all donations through the Internet, and, there you go, unprecedented online fundraising. She could also trigger all of her auto-credit-card donations to go through when needed to maximize her perceived success. Also counts as Internet bucks.

You're right that it's all about perceived success; Hillary's camp did a good job feigning desperation ahead of the PA results (everyone on TV had bought into the line that she was broke; prominent donors were feeding them info that it'd dry up without a win there) to lead into her 'turning the tide' story.

By AlchemyToday at Thu, 04/24/2008 - 10:02am | login or register to post comments

Sounds like you are advocating for a neutral observer

Thankfully, the Democrats already have that option. ActBlue's numbers will always be up-to-date and correct and any fundraising claim made by a campaign using ActBlue is 100% trustworthy.

Sure, I'm biased, but boasting about fundraising number always irks me when it comes from a non-transparent campaign. I'm sure that 99% of campaigns are absolutely truthful, but if you want to brag (nothing wrong with it!) use a neutral party to verify your numbers.

Since the thread was originally about Clinton and her numbers, I might as well say that I know her campaign to be professionally managed and I don't think they would ever exaggerate.

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Disclosure: I work for ActBlue as their Technology Director.

By KansasNate at Thu, 04/24/2008 - 12:30pm | login or register to post comments



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