Bernie Sanders Raised $18 Million in 6 Weeks, His 2020 Campaign Says
WASHINGTON — Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont raised $18.2 million over the first six weeks of his presidential bid, his campaign announced Tuesday, a display of financial strength that cements his status as one of the top fund-raisers in the sprawling Democratic field.
Mr. Sanders received almost 900,000 contributions from 525,000 individual donors, his campaign manager, Faiz Shakir, said. The average donation was $20, compared with $27 in Mr. Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign, he said.
Mr. Shakir said that a majority of Mr. Sanders’s donors were under the age of 39, and that 20 percent of all donors had not contributed to Mr. Sanders’s previous campaigns. He said that 88 percent of the total raised in the first quarter came from donors giving $200 or less.
Mr. Sanders’s announcement of his fund-raising for the first quarter of the year had been highly anticipated, as he was expected to reveal a formidable total. Presidential candidates must report their first-quarter fund-raising to the Federal Election Commission by April 15, but they can choose to disclose information before that deadline. The announcement on Tuesday offered a chance for Mr. Sanders’s team to showcase the breadth of support for his campaign.
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His total exceeds those of the two other candidates who have already announced their fund-raising numbers for the first quarter of the year, Senator Kamala Harris of California and Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Ind.
Ms. Harris’s campaign said on Monday night that she had raised $12 million in the first quarter, while Mr. Buttigieg said early Monday that he had raised more than $7 million. Both candidates entered the race in January, several weeks before Mr. Sanders announced his candidacy.
Former Representative Beto O’Rourke of Texas, who entered the race in March and has been a prolific online fund-raiser, has yet to announce his haul for the quarter.
The fund-raising totals are important beyond the symbolic value they carry for candidates who can point to large numbers of supporters. The Iowa caucuses are still 10 months away, meaning that Democratic candidates will need to be able to fund their campaigns for a long stretch of time just to make it to the first nominating contest.
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Mr. Sanders posted a bigger opening number than he did in the last presidential race, when he raised about $14 million in the quarter that covered April through June of 2015. Mr. Shakir said it took 146 days, or about 21 weeks, for Mr. Sanders to reach 900,000 donations in that campaign.
But the amount raised by Mr. Sanders this quarter was not off the charts for a Democratic presidential hopeful. Hillary Clinton raised about $47 million in her first quarter as a candidate in the 2016 campaign, though unlike Mr. Sanders, she relied heavily on big donations.
Mr. Sanders began the 2020 race with the benefit of an enormous donor base that he developed in his primary campaign against Mrs. Clinton, when he raised well over $200 million. After jumping into the 2020 race on Feb. 19, he quickly reminded his rivals of his large following, collecting $5.9 million in the first 24 hours and a total of $10 million within a week. (Only Mr. O’Rourke disclosed a bigger 24-hour haul, with $6.1 million.)
The Sanders campaign had set a goal of receiving one million individual donations by the end of the first quarter. The campaign fell short of that goal, but Mr. Shakir expressed no regret about having aimed for it. “It was important to us to set an ambitious goal,” he said.
Mr. Sanders’s financial resources go beyond the money he has received since entering the presidential race. Like others running for president who have previously run for federal office, he can make use of funds that he had raised in earlier campaigns. He began the 2020 race with $14 million available for his use, Mr. Shakir said.
Mr. Shakir said the new fund-raising total showed that the movement Mr. Sanders began in his 2016 campaign was still gaining steam. He noted that there had been questions from pundits about whether that would be the case: “Is this movement sustaining? Is it still there?”
“The answer is a resounding yes,” he said. “It is still strong and it is still growing.”