Bernie appears to eclipse Hillary for small-donor support – LIVE Guardian UK
timestamp 20:55
The Guardians Paul Lewis (@paullewis) has a look through the Sanders filing and finds evidence of broad, grassroots support. Paul writes:
snip
For true comparisons, well have to wait for all candidates required to file by this deadline to submit their documents. But the submission from Bernie Sanders shows a level of broad, grassroots support that, measured as a ratio of small to large donors, it will be hard for others (Clinton included) to rival. More than three-quarters of his haul - totalling just under $10.5m - came from donors who gave less than $200 in the two months since he announced his White House run.
His campaign - keen to spin the case that his campaign is spurred by grassroots backers rather than big-money donors - released a statement saying more than 284,000 individual donors gave an average contribution of just over $35 each. Or as Sanders put it: Our campaign is a strong grassroots movement supported by middle-class Americans from working families, not billionaires trying to buy elections.
Jeb Bush, by comparison, raised just $368,023 from small donors.
Records show that Bernie 2016 has a not-too-shabby cash-on-hand figure, either: $12,161,737.67. Thats more than Bush, although the former Florida governor has deliberately encouraged supporters to direct their donations to his preferred Super Pac, Right to Rise USA
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2015/jul/15/fec-filings-2016-presidential-campaigns-liveblog#block-55a676f1e4b0f63008f13e59