Days After CNN Debate, Andrew Yang Raises $1.1 Million, 87% From New Donors

Brian Hanley
2 min readAug 7, 2019

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Andrew Yang may have received less speaking time than any other candidate at the second Democratic debate, but that didn’t stop him from winning the night.

Source: The Washington Post

Yang walked away from CNN’s debate stage having gained more Twitter followers than any other candidate vying for the Democratic nomination.

But more important than his Twitter engagement was his online fundraising success. Yang converted many of his new followers into small-dollar donors.

In the five days following CNN’s debate, Yang raised $1.1 million from 38,376 individuals. Supporters of Senator Sanders might be wooed by the fact that Yang’s average campaign contribution following the debate was about $27.

Even more impressively, the vast majority of these contributions came from new donors. 34,602 out of the 38,376 who donated in that five-day window were contributing to Yang for the very first time. I’ll repeat that. 87 percent of donors who gave to Yang after the debate had never given to him before.

If Yang’s campaign can secure just one more qualifying poll, he’ll earn yet another spot on the debate stage in September. And if his past debate performance was any sign of things to come, one might expect Yang, once deemed a longer-than-long-shot, to continue growing his grassroots machine.

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Brian Hanley

Political Reporter covering the Bernie Sanders campaign(s): @huffpost, @nytimes @nymag @wsj @forbes, etc.