Obama: $60M in February?
by Patrick Ruffini :: February 21st, 2008 5:20 pmAccording to my initial projections off this crowdsourced spreadsheet of Obama donations I set up after the Wisconsin victory, Obama has already raised at least $45 million for February and is on track to raise $60 million for the month.
A source who tracks Obama’s public donation number like a hawk tells me that Obama had tallied about 256,000 donors for the year as of the end of January. Those donors produced $36 million in receipts, for an average contribution of $140.
Obama’s public donor count stands at 583,525, meaning about 327,000 people donated in February. With the same average, that would give Obama just over $46 million in 21 days.
This is in line with the expectations game they are playing. The campaign says they will raise at least $36 million in February. You can bet that they wouldn’t say that if they hadn’t already passed the mark, plus a decent sized buffer. Their lowered expectations call for them to beat January’s total, when they will in fact blow them out.
A couple of notes.
First, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the $140 average go up this month. People give more as the stakes go up. I’m sure he is also getting some “frontrunner” money he wasn’t getting before. I wouldn’t be surprised if the total would up being $70 million.
Also, thanks to an interesting quirk in the way the Obama website publicly records donations — batch uploading donations from made from the email fundraising link at once — it’s possible to separate out donations made from email from those that organically come in on the Web site. Both e-mails I tracked seemed to generate about 36,000 contributions, or somewhere between $3.5 and $4 million. So, even without any momentum-generating primary victories (in fact, there are none left this month), all the Obama campaign would need to do is send 3 or 4 more emails to their list to reach $60 million.
Adjust your March 1 David Plouffe conference call expectations accordingly.
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Maybe they will give you a job Ruffini? Got to say, you’ve got an excellent anti-Republican resume built up already.
that’s like calling the Wall Street Journal Marxists for reporting on a stock market crash
Hello there !
A whopping figure… And it points to the reason why Obama is winning state after state - sidelining Hillary.
Sean
Why you might be wrong:
1. It is not the campaign who said “36 millions” but “A source of mine tells me that an Obama fundraiser confided to him”. Greg Sargent is being fairly precise about this, hence so should you. For all we know, that Obama fundraiser could have been honestly sharing info with a friend, hence he could have been truthful about the 36 million.
2. You assume the new donors are averaging the same amount as the old ones; I think many of them just want to get involved and have understood that donating $25 is better than nothing. If half of them went that way, the other half should be averaging around $250 to keep the overall average at $140.
3. It is fair to think most of the 256,000 January donors didn’t stop donating (which might help your argument). But among them he did lose a significant base of $2300 donors (they might not be impressive in numbers, but their contribution is), which I feel was not replaced at the same rate with February new max donors.
This may actually understate the February number.
The figures for numbers of donors lists the number of different donors. So, using a linear model to project the February donations is inappropriate. A linear model assumes both that the average donation stays the same, AND that the old donors did not give any new money. The repeat donors will add significantly to the tally; going in to February there were approximately 700,000 of them.
Moreover, as of 8:30 this morning, the number of donors for 2008 was up to 613,525!!!
Let me piggyback off of Jerold and davidv’s comments.
The running tally on the website is of unique donors for 2008. In other words, there were 256,000 total individual donors in January, but that count didn’t reset. In February, Obama now has some 360,000 donors who didn’t give him anything in the prior month (but may have done so last year). But that doesn’t include any repeat donations he’s scored from the 256,000 people who gave him money in January - they were already counted. Given that his e-mail solicitations are targeted at those already linked in to the campaign, and that he’s ramped up the solicitations this month, I suspect he’s raking in a fare number of repeat donations that aren’t showing up in the donor tally.
I suspect that will drive up both his total and average donations. On average, repeat donors give less the second and third times around. In January, the campaign has said it had about 170,000 first-time donors, meaning that some 86,000 were offering repeat donations. In all probability, those folks dragged down the average contribution. I suspect the proportion of first-time donors will be significantly higher this time around, both because Obama seems more likely to win, and because many of these inclined to give repeatedly already gave in January.
Even so, $70 million seems a little high. Obama’s supporters tend to rally to him when he seems threatened. He had a then-record fundraising day when he lost the New Hampshire primary. In the first part of this month, the threat from Hillary seemed particularly plausible. It’s how Plouffe leveraged Hillary’s loan and funraising appeal into an astonishing $7 million haul. With that threat receding, we may not see that rate of donation replicated again. I’m going to guess that counting the repeated donors, he’s currently somewhere around $50 million - perhaps a little above it. That should put him on pace for around $60 million on the month, still an astonishing sum.
You guys are setting up huge expectations of Obama and it is 8 months from the election. Can we just cool down please. No democrat want’s this hype now so early.
Patrick,
You might be interested in my tracking of the numbers from Obama’s graphics. I’ve got data from 2/8 to current. I tracked the 500k graphic until it looked like it wasn’t really keeping up with real time anymore. Then I shifted to the 1 million goal graphic. I was able to interpolate some readings and get a pretty accurate number of 365,000 donors prior to 2008.
http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pPq3z3VBZYWl3Tv5a18SaGw
Feel free to link to this.
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