Much has been made today of Donald Trump’s lackluster fundraising productivity in May. I’m going to pile on here, because his campaign is an absolute fiasco in essentially every sense.
In lieu of a full analysis of what this means in terms of inference and prediction, here are three simple rankings/comparisons. (For the full read of the data, see here: Bernie, Hillary, Trump.)
Total contributions, through the entire cycle through May:
- Bernie: $224 Million.
- Hillary: $207 Million.
- Donald: $17 Million.
Candidates can loan money to their own campaign (meaning they can use campaign contributions to pay themselves back):
- Donald: $45 Million.
- Hillary: $0.
- Bernie: $0.
Third, donations to federal campaigns fall into two categories: itemized and unitemized. Itemized donations are those that, in sum, for an individual, exceed $200. Unitemized are those that sum to less than $200 for the donor.
With that said, the proportion of donations that are unitemized to date for each candidate:
- Donald: 72.9%
- Bernie: 59.0%
- Hillary: 21.6%
What does this indicate?
First, Bernie and Hillary are vastly outperforming Trump in terms of raising money. VASTLY. There’s a bit of chicken and egg here, but the simple fact is that raising money requires a ground operation, and the data confirms observation that Hillary and Bernie have such operations in place, and Trump—well, not so much.
Second, Donald Trump is actually self-financing his campgin on the idea that he will get sufficient contributions to pay himself back. Hillary and Bernie are not doing so.
Third, Hillary’s contributions are coming from “big” donors much more than are Donald’s (limited) contributions or Bernie’s (significant) contributions. For Bernie, this makes sense: he is appealing to a swath of the US electorate that doesn’t generally have the wherewithal to donate $200 to a political campaign.
For Trump, maybe the same argument applies…Don’t know. It’s just a very large ratio of unitemized contributions. I’ll leave it there.
With this, and in light of the absolutely shameful failure of the Senate to undertake serious efforts at preventing gun violence yesterday, I leave you with this.