You should be seeing a few fewer political fundraising emails in your inbox today, though you were likely bombarded with them yesterday. The 3rd quarter officially ended last night, and the candidates were racing to post the largest numbers – both in dollars raised and unique donors – as if he or she with the most money wins.
As one who feels the Bern, I can’t help but marvel at the irony in today’s news. Follow me here…
Bernie Sanders has stated that he will have one litmus test for Supreme Court nominees, and reiterated it Tuesday when he spoke at the University of Chicago Institute of Politics
“No nominee of mine to the United States Supreme Court will get that job unless he or she is loud and clear that one of their first orders of business will be to overturn Citizens United,”
Getting money out of politics is what that’s all about. Yet today was the day that we got the first quarterly fundraising numbers for some of 2016’s crop of candidates.
The idea that those numbers were going to be particularly good for Bernie Sanders came early yesterday, when his campaign announced that online donations had passed the one million mark! After last night’s FEC deadline passed, the Sanders campaign revised upwards their earlier estimate, shocking the pundits, the media and, no doubt, the Clinton. When Chris Cilllizaa, no friend to progressives, writes something like this, you know this is a big fucking deal!
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton technically beat Bernie Sanders by $2 million in the chase for campaign cash over the past three months. But that isn’t the story — not even close.
Clinton held 58 fundraising events to raise her total; Sanders held seven. As of the end of September, Sanders had brought in 1.3 million total donations from 650,000 individuals since he began running. Clinton’s campaign did not release how many total donors she has. And Sanders ended September with $25 million in the bank; Clinton did not release how much money her campaign had on hand.
Read between the lines, and you get this: Sanders is drawing huge amounts of small-dollar donations via the Web. That means two important things: (1) Sanders has been able to concentrate on meeting and greeting potential voters rather than spending his time courting donors, and (2) He has been able to conserve money because he isn’t spending cash on lavish events for donors.
…
Sometimes, top-line numbers don’t tell the whole story. This is one of those cases. Yes, Clinton raised the most money. But, make no mistake: This is Sanders’s quarter.
Maybe now the media will start paying a little more attention to Sen. Sanders. Or not.
Today on the show…
It’s Driftglass Thursday! Today, we talked about how history tends to repeat itself, and Driftglass reminded us about Newt Gingrich’s wild ouster ride.
In hour two, I couldn’t wait to speak with Howie Klein after he sent out this mysteriously awesome Tweet yesterday:
Don’t ask for a link. Excellent source: The reviled Debbie Wasserman Schultz will be replaced by Jennifer Granholm
— Howie Klein (@downwithtyranny) September 30, 2015
I’ve been procrastinating on getting this post done, and now the news says that 7-10 people are dead, more than 20 shot at Umpqua Community College in Oregon. I think I’m going to be sick.
Welcome to ‘merica. I’ll see you tomorrow, radio or not…
