Candidates go head-to-head in Super Tuesday money race
by Will Tucker and Jia You on February 25, 2016
Next Tuesday could make or break some of the remaining presidential campaigns and leave us with just a handful.
The race for cash from the Super Tuesday states looks very different from the race for delegates, though.
Four candidates have won at least one of the dozen states with March 1 primaries or caucuses, measured by donations to their campaigns of greater than $200. Mouse over each state on the interactive map below to see the top two fundraisers there and how much they raised, and click on a candidate name below the map to see who would have won each state without that candidate in the race.
[To see the featured infographic, click here.]
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, clearly, raked in the most cash from these states as of Jan. 31, a total of $22.4 million out of an overall fundraising haul of $100 million from donors giving her more than $200. She also leads her opponent Sen. Bernie Sanders in most polls; Sanders bested her only in his home state of Vermont in terms of money. To be fair, though, Sanders receives the bulk of his money from contributors giving less than $200, for whom the public disclosure of name and address is not required; those donors can’t be included in an analysis like this.
All together, presidential candidates raised $86.5 million from Super Tuesday states since the race began last year, data show. After Clinton, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) raised the most from this swath of the country, bringing in $19.4 million in itemized contributions.
If it seems like someone’s missing from the map, that’s because he is. Real estate mogul Donald Trump, the Republican front-runner currently steamrolling his divided opponents in the race for GOP delegates, raised relatively little for his campaign because he’s largely loaning it the money himself. In the race for cash, he doesn’t place first or second in any Super Tuesday states, having raised just $611,659 from them all. Current polling from the five biggest states shows him winning all but one of them. (Recent polling data wasn’t available for all Super Tuesday states.) By contrast, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) isn’t in the top two spots among the Republicans in either polling or fundraising in any of the states with voting next week, even though the perceived wisdom is that he has the backing of the monied GOP establishment.
Instead, it’s retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson who takes the most states in the GOP field as measured by fundraising. From the states of Alabama, Alaska, North Dakota and Wyoming, he’s raised about $870,000. Not that Carson should take too much comfort there: His rival, Cruz, raised $14.7 million just from his home state of Texas, the one state in which he claims first place as a fundraiser.
If Carson weren’t in the picture, Cruz would pick up three more states: Alabama, Wyoming and North Dakota. Notably absent from that list, though, are Georgia, Tennessee and Arkansas, crucibles of the deeply religious South that Cruz saw as his ticket to the nomination.
Of course, some of the candidates who place in the top two in the money race in those states have already departed the campaign trail. Arkansas has given quite a bit to Clinton, its former first lady, but also was generous to Mike Huckabee, its former governor. In Georgia, Tennessee and Virginia, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush takes second place behind Clinton.
While the numbers may provide some clues to the reach of each candidate’s support, their linkage to results at the end of the night Tuesday could be tenuous at best. If the money race was ever an indicator of how a candidate could perform in a state’s primary, in this cycle, Trump’s performance — as well as underperformances by Carson and Bush, among others — has blown up that thinking.
Senior Researcher Doug Weber contributed to this report.
Originally published at www.opensecrets.org on February 25, 2016.
