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A Different Angle on Obama’s Campaign Finance Numbers

By Deb Cupples on July 14, 2008 at 8:00 PM in Campaigns & Campaign Financing, Obama

Campaign finance junkies tend to believe that dollars from big donors reflect favors that candidates will owe to those donors — especially money given by corporate employees or bundled by lobbyists. 

Such perceptions might be why Barack Obama’s campaign staff has done numerical gymnastics trying to create the impression that the campaign is mostly funded by truly small donors (those who gave a total of $200 or less). You can read about those gymnastics here.

While Obama’s staffers have been diligent about comparing percentages relating to donation size, they don’t seem too keen on comparing the actual dollar amounts that Obama and McCain have received from "big" donors.

No worries: I have the data and am happy to make the comparison for them.

The table below is based on data from a Campaign Finance Institute pdf that lists donation totals from January 2007 through May 2008.  I highlighted in red the higher figures for each category of totals received from "big" donors, and “mil” means “million”:

$201-$999 $1000-$2299 $2300+  $1000+ (all)
Obama
 $50 mil . $42 mil $48 mil $91 mil
McCain $14 mil . $24 mil $43 mil $67 mil

Note: to conserve space, I used only the first two digits of the figures: this worked in Obama’s favor in some categories and in McCain’s favor in others.

I did not make up the categories.  Obama’s campaign chose $200 as a cutoff point between big and small donors, as evinced by a statement that his staff made to the New York Times last month:

"The Obama campaign highlighted Thursday the fact that 93 percent of the more than three million contributions it had received were for $200 or less." (NY Times, emphasis added)

The $200 cutoff likely stems from the fact that the Federal Elections Commission doesn’t require itemization for donors who give a total of $200 or less. If the FEC and Sen. Obama use $200 as a cutoff, who am I to argue?

To prevent confusion over the New York Times quote, I’ll mention (as I did a few weeks ago) that small donors contributed 49% of Obama’s total donations (from January 2007 – May 2008), meaning that big donors contributed 51%. 

That 49% is an impressive statistic — better than McCain’s small-donor percentage — but it’s a far cry from the 93% that skim readers might mis-interpret as the portion of Obama’s total donations received from small donors. 

My point is not to draw conclusions about Sen. Obama’s having taken larger amounts of money from big donors than McCain has since January 2007.

I just want to get the data out there, since most media have failed to present said data to the general public.