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EXPECTATIONS GAME. Perhaps in response to the buzz around Barack Obama's announcement that his campaign is close to the ground-breaking 250,000-donor mark for the second fundraising quarter, which ends this Saturday, Hillary Clinton's communications director Howard Wolfson has sent an e-mail to "friends" explicitly reminding folks that HRC is on track to meet her last-quarter numbers:
We expect to bring in about what we did in the First Quarter, or slightly more, which should put us in the range of $27 million. To put that figure in some perspective, it is more than any Democrat has ever raised in the second quarter of the “off” year. While that figure is record setting, we do expect Senator Obama to significantly outraise us this quarter.I should say so. Let's do some back-of-the-envelope math here, shall we? Last quarter, Obama brought in $25.7 million from 104,000 donors. This time around, he is shooting for 250,000 donors (his campaign currently reports 245,272). Even assuming that all Obama's second-quarter growth was from low-dollar donors (an assumption that's almost certainly incorrect), I don't see how this adds up to less than $37 million. The average online political donation tends to be around $80 per person. Multiply that by 150,000 and you get $12 million, which can be added to a presumed mix of high and low-dollar donations from the other 100,000 equalling $25 million, as was the case for Obama last quarter. Even if the number of high-dollar donors among the first 100,000 was lower this time, reducing his per-donor average among the first 100,000 from close to $250 to, say, $200, his minimum total for the 250,000 would be $32 million. And a per-donor average of just $160 for all 250,000 donors would still add up to $37.5 million. His per-donor average would have to fall to $140 or below for him to raise less than $35 million; last quarter his per donor average was nearly $250.CORRECTION: The number of donors is for the year to date, not for the second quarter, rendering the above irrelevant. The campaign was predicting 150,000 donors this quarter, not 250,000.
--Garance Franke-Ruta
