Bernie Sanders’ Financial Industry Donations By the Numbers

Recently, the Hillary Clinton campaign has called out Bernie Sanders for purported hypocrisy on the subject of donations. During his first campaign for senate in 2006, they contend, Sanders accepted money from the financial industry indirectly by accepting funds from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC).

While the Clinton campaign’s critique of Sanders is technically factual, it hides the truth. The truth is that the amount of money Sanders accepted from the financial industry through the DSCC is minimal, and is insignificant especially when measured against Clinton’s own fundraising from the banks.

In 2006, according to OpenSecrets.org, Sanders received a total of $37,300 from the DSCC for his senatorial campaign.

That year, the DSCC received $75,890,564 in donations, and of those donations $8,794,364 — or 11.58% — were from what OpenSecrets terms the Securities & Investment industry. This means that for his 2006 campaign, Sanders received 0.05% of the total take from the DSCC. And from the financial industry, he received 11.58% of that 0.05%, which comes out to be $4,319.34.

For reference, Sanders raised a total of $5,554,466 for his 2006 senatorial campaign. Which means that about 0.8% of his total funds came from the financial industry.

Now, these numbers, of course, aren’t entirely accurate. Top contributors to the DSCC in 2006 included groups like Friends of Hillary and Feinstein for Senate, which may themselves have received donations from the financial industry. But it’s also true that OpenSecrets’ Securities & Investment category isn’t just the financial industry as we think of it. It also includes groups like community banks and credit unions that neither candidate would claim are bad actors.

So perhaps it evens out. Or even if it doesn’t, it would not be amiss to say that the numbers above are representative of the larger point.

In any case, it’s interesting to note that of Hillary Clinton’s top five contributors in the 2006 fund-raising cycle, two were banks (Goldman Sachs and Citigroup). And when broken down by industry, her second largest contributor, according to OpenSecrets, was Securities & Investment.

By contrast, none of Sanders’s top contributors in the 2006 cycle were from the financial industry. The only Securities & Investment groups that donated to his campaign were associations representing credit unions. And of his top five largest contributors, three were labor unions.

I respect that Hillary Clinton’s campaign is pushing back against the perception that she is somehow corrupted by the fact that she has accepted donations from the financial industry. I may even agree that she is not. After all, Wall Street is in her home state, so it’s only natural that they would contribute generously to her campaigns.

But by the numbers, attacking Sanders’s supposed hypocrisy on the issue is disingenuous at best, and seems a little bit petty. It invites voters to do what I’ve done here and take a closer look at the money. And that serves Hillary Clinton not at all.