New York Times
Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont has a huge lead over other Democratic presidential candidates in the number of individual donors they have each accumulated so far. This is the first time since the primary race began in earnest that we can estimate how many individual donors each candidate has attracted — a key indicator of how much they are catching on with voters.
Mr. Sanders is relying heavily on small donors to power his campaign, and he entered the 2020 race with a huge network of online donors who supported his 2016 presidential bid. The map above shows the breadth of Mr. Sanders's roster of donors across the United States.
A map that includes the rest of the Democratic field without Mr. Sanders offers a picture of where the other major candidates are picking up donors. Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, the other leading progressive in the race, is outpacing the rest of the field across much of the country — a sign that her strategy of relying on grass-roots donors, and refraining from holding high-dollar fund-raisers, is working.
The map also shows regional strength for some candidates, like former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who is doing well in Delaware and northeastern Pennsylvania, as well as in many places across the Southeast. Senator Kamala Harris of California is formidable in her home state, the nation's most populous. And Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind., has drawn strong support in some parts of the Midwest.
Attracting individual donors has been particularly important in the 2020 race because the Democratic National Committee is using grass-roots fund-raising as one of the qualification standards for the debates. To qualify for the next round of debates in September, candidates will need to have at least 130,000 unique donors, in addition to meeting a polling requirement.
Over all, Mr. Sanders is leading his rivals in total money raised, but not by a huge margin — even though he has far more donors than any of them.
Most other candidates are drawing in more dollars per donor — an estimated average of roughly $80 for both Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris, for example. Mr. Sanders, on the other hand, has brought in an estimated $46 per donor.
Mr. Sanders's campaign has tried to encourage larger contributions. "We have two choices: We need more donations or we need people to give just a bit more than they have before," Faiz Shakir, Mr. Sanders's campaign manager, wrote in an email in the spring.
While Mr. Sanders has a sprawling list of donors nationwide, geographic dominance does not necessarily translate into a cash advantage of the same magnitude. Just as population density differs in urban, suburban and rural areas, the number of people who donate to political campaigns also varies widely based on geography.
Ranking as the top Democrat for individual donors in a densely populated urban area is far different from leading the field in an area where few people are donating to campaigns.
For example, Ms. Warren has more donors in a single ZIP code in Brooklyn than any candidate has in the entire state of Mississippi. Mr. Buttigieg has more donors in a single ZIP code in Washington, D.C., than any candidate has in South Dakota.
