2020 Presidential Fundraising — Where is the 2016 money going?
The 2020 Democratic presidential primary is well under way, but elements of 2016 are already evident in the way the large field of candidates is fundraising.
In an earlier post we looked at instances where donors had already decided to give to more than one of the current 2020 contenders. We were curious, too, which of the candidates had the most donors in common with the 2016 Democratic candidates, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. Here’s what we found:
The first thing we discovered is how consistent the two 2016 campaign’s donors were, when it came to the likelihood that they have already donated to a 2020 campaign. About 3,000 donors to Sanders’ 2016 effort have given in 2020, and about 3,000 donors to Clinton’s can say the same. These are just mere fractions of their total number of donors in 2016, but it is still very early in the cycle. So where are those donations going?
If you guessed that Bernie’s 2016 donors are now his 2020 donors, you are correct. No surprises there. These $200+ contributions are likely emblematic of the unitemized, <$200 donors that we don’t have visibility into (see sidebar, above). The consistency and loyalty of Sander’s supporters evident here aligns with our finding that his 2020 donors are least likely to have also donated to other 2020 candidates, and recent polling that a significant portion of his supporters would rather vote for President Donald Trump than another Democratic contender, should Bernie lose the primary.
Perhaps more interesting, then, is what we find when we look at donors to the 2016 Hillary for America campaign. Of course, Clinton isn’t running this cycle, so we would expect them to be far more evenly distributed among the current crop of candidates — and where they are going might provide some insight about where the more traditional/institutional Democratic donors, in general, might be headed.
Let’s see:
Indeed, the distribution is much more even. However, there are certainly some stand-outs. The top recipient of Clinton donor cash is Senator Kamala Harris, with more than twice as many as the next-place recipient. Also intriguing is that the second-place recipient in question is Mayor Pete Buttigieg — making him the only non-senator to get a healthy share of Clinton’s former donors.
As a percentage of their total individual, itemized donors so far, Senator Kristen Gillibrand tops the charts, with ~24% of her donors having previously donated to Clinton. Clinton, too, once represented New York in the Senate, and Gillibrand’s donors are heavily concentrated in that state right now, so that kind of alignment is consistent. Senator Amy Klobuchar follows Gillibrand, with 21% of her donors previously contributing to Clinton, followed by Harris (19%) and Buttigieg (16%).
Perhaps most glaring in these results is how relatively few Clinton 2016 donors have decided to put their cash behind Bernie in 2020. It would seem as if very few of Clinton’s supporters are jumping at the opportunity to support Sanders, now that their favored candidate is no longer in the running. In fact, only 1.2% of Bernie’s itemized donors gave to Hillary in 2016 — the lowest rate in the whole bunch.
While Bernie has a built-in fundraising advantage, with his fresh and loyal base of donors from 2016, the field remains wide open when it comes to capturing more and more of those that opened their wallets to support Hillary in 2016. We’ll keep monitoring and let you know if any particular candidate seems to be consolidating that financial base.
