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A group of advisors to Senator Bernie Sanders began arriving at the Capitol Hill townhouse, which he used as a makeshift headquarters before dawn last Tuesday, where they prepared to follow, among other things, the deluge. donations that would land after Sanders had made his presidential campaign official.
While the team was nibbling donuts that Jeff Weaver, Sanders' campaign leader for the 2016 campaign, had brought for the launch day, a laptop screen was showing a map of the United States. It would light up with an orange dot each time the location of each donation is indicated.
A few minutes after the announcement of 7 am, the entire screen was orange, according to the people present in the room.
On Monday, after less than a week as a presidential candidate, Sanders raised $ 10 million from 359,914 donors, campaign officials said. But here may be such an impressive figure for its rivals: nearly 39% of these donors used an email address that had never been used before to give Mr. Sanders.
For Sanders, the flow of money from new e-mail addresses made his team think that he was significantly expanding the network of donors who had already thwarted his 2020 contest.
"Our second day," said Ari Rabin-Havt, a senior advisor to Mr. Sanders, "was bigger than the first day of the others."
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There is little surprise that Mr. Sanders, whose 2016 Democratic Party primary campaign generated $ 230 million in grassroots contributions, publishes a large number of fundraisers if he runs again. But the size of his advantage – he collected $ 5.9 million on his first day of candidacy, nearly 20 times more than Senator Elizabeth Warren on his first day and almost four times more than the 1.5 million Senator Kamala Harris's dollars – has established it as a financial front-runner in an overcrowded Democratic field.
"I think the fact that he has raised so much, so fast and so early should be of concern to anyone who wants to raise the Liberal flag in this nomination contest," said Craig Varoga, a Democratic strategist not aligned in the race. .
On Sanders' first day donation, only 17 people gave him the maximum amount of $ 2,800, which means he can ask more than 99.99% of his donors to donate again. . At the end of Monday, only 20 donors gave Sanders the legal maximum. 46 others donated $ 2,700, the last campaign limit.
More than 48,000 donors have already agreed to give Mr. Sanders several times, signing recurring donations from their credit cards with a combined value of more than $ 1 million a month, according to statistics provided to New York Times by the campaign. The overall average contribution was just under $ 26.
But the fact that so much of the donation comes from new email addresses is perhaps the most significant figure beyond the total. Although some of these new e-mail addresses are surely old donors with updated contact information – graduating students, for example, or people who have changed from one to another. job – the idea that a sizeable share of Mr. Sanders' donors could be new mine hope rivals that Mr. Sanders had reached his peak, even though he was passionate, by a party minority when he applied four years ago.
"There is an assumption that he is relying on this base of loyal support for 2016," said Jen Psaki, Democratic strategist and former director of communications for President Barack Obama at the White House. But an influx of new donors "would lead people to question the assumption that Bernie supporters are only Bernie's followers from 2016, end of history," a- she declared.
Mr. Sanders raised $ 73 million in 2015. This year, he entered the race about 70 days earlier in the calendar and collected four times more on his first day, which suggests a potential 100 millions of dollars in 2019.
Hillary Clinton, who beat Sanders at the 2016 primary, raised more than him in this race. But it was with the Democratic Party's weight behind it, a huge list of supporters of its 2008 run and 4 million additional names from the Ready for Hillary group, which had rallied grassroots supporters before its campaign.
No rival of Mr. Sanders in 2020 has nothing to do with that.
In a move that seemed intended to compete with Mr. Sanders for small donors, Warren's campaign announced Monday that it would give up all traditional private fundraising and individual meetings with large donors.
Rabin-Havt has been trying to meet the long-term financial expectations for the Sanders campaign. "It will be remarkable to emulate these 2015 numbers again," he said.
Money alone is not decisive in presidential politics. In the Republican primaries of 2016, a super PAC that supported Jeb Bush spent $ 100 million, while Bush did not finish better than fourth in any of the first three states. But the money is used to pay TV ads and staff in the field, and Mr. Sanders' fundraising advantage will allow him to take risks and make investments that others can not afford. .
"He can build a ground game not only in the first four states, but also in the Super Tuesday states," said Ms Psaki. "He can expand his playground in places like California."
The Sanders campaign has been able to share new donor statistics so far, giving a younger-than-average image. An internal analysis showed that more than 108,000 of Sanders' first contributors were 39 years old or younger, and gave a combined total of $ 2.5 million out of the $ 5.9 million raised. The most common age for a Sanders contributor was 30 years old. In addition, more than $ 3 million in donations from the first day came from mobile devices, a sign of both changing habits and the relative youth of its donor base. The campaign did not provide a breakdown by sex.
Sanders has been closely monitoring fundraising events, campaign officials said. Mr. Rabin-Havt said the senator had written much of the initial email announcement of 1,400 words of the campaign.
The email did not explicitly ask for money, but asked people to sign a petition in favor of Mr. Sanders. About 40% of the signatories also contributed, said his campaign.
Tim Tagaris and Robin Curran, Sanders' two leading digital consultants in 2020, are both veterans of his 2016 race, but other members of this team are about to join other campaigns. or are about to join him.
Rabin-Havt noted that the world of Democratic donors continues to grow. "We have not yet reached a decreasing rate of return," he said.
He added that the Sanders campaign thought they had a unique advantage.
"The secret sauce for Bernie Sanders' fundraiser," he said, "is Bernie."
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