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When a presidential candidate raises a lot of money, they’re probably going to tell you about it, which leads to a lot of headlines like this:
Those headlines aren’t wrong, but they also don’t tell you that much on their own. That’s because each candidate who’s bragging about his or her fundraising total is doing it in a vacuum. It’s tough to know whether to care about, say, Bernie Sanders’s haul without knowing what the other candidates brought in.
Luckily, all candidates must file detailed reports of their fundraising and spending at least once a quarter. This information, which is made public by the Federal Election Commission, allows for a better kind of analysis: one that compares each candidate to all the others. We’re going to help you do that.
This primary season, FiveThirtyEight and the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit investigative news organization, are teaming up to track those filings and update this page with the latest numbers each quarter. Fundraising is obviously hugely important to a political campaign, but fundraising numbers alone can’t always tell you whether a campaign is going strong or hitting the skids. (For example, women and people of color generally have a harder time raising money than white men do, so a strong quarter for Kamala Harris might still bring in a lower total than a similarly strong quarter for Sanders.) Instead, think of fundraising as one more indicator of campaign health, alongside things like endorsements, polls and media coverage. Together, all these metrics give us a sense of who is attracting attention heading into the primaries and caucuses.
Here’s how the 2020 money race is shaping up. Totals here include all the money a candidate raised for the presidential race this quarter, regardless of whether it’s earmarked for the primary or the general election. (Note: Second-quarter totals do not include Eric Swalwell, who has dropped out of the race, or Joe Sestak, who entered the race at the very end of the quarter.)
The leader this quarter
Bernie Sanders led the Democrats this quarter, raising $25.7 million total, of which 70.2 percent came from individual donors. That’s $0.7 million more than Pete Buttigieg, who came in second with $24.9 million, and $0.9 million less than President Trump, who raised $26.5 million in the second quarter. But wait, you might grumble, this is exactly the sort of boring financial coverage that gives people an incomplete picture of the race!
You’d have a point. In general, these numbers make more sense when they’re judged against candidates’ expectations. We’ve written before about the relationship between poll numbers and name recognition — namely, politicians tend to have higher net favorability ratings when more voters know who they are — and it stands to reason that higher name recognition could translate to more money as well. After all, people don’t donate to candidates they’ve never heard of.
Here’s how Democratic candidates’ fundraising this quarter compares to their name recognition.
Big names tend to get more cash
Not well known, raised a lot
Well known, raised a lot
Not well known, raised a little
Well known, raised a little
Estimated name recognition: %
Total raised: $NaNM
Name recognition was estimated using favorability polls — the share of respondents who had any opinion (positive or negative) of a candidate is used as a proxy for the share of people who know who the candidate is.
Joe Biden, who leads in name recognition at 89.49 percent, was the second-place fundraiser in terms of money raised from individual donors in the second quarter. (This total excludes money raised from other sources, like transfers from political committees and money the candidate gave to their own campaign.)
This year’s donors
Candidates’ fundraising totals for each quarter generally include not just money raised from individual donors, but also money from PACs, money left over from previous campaigns and money from the candidate’s own pocket.
Here’s where each Democratic candidate’s money came from so far this year.
Bernie Sanders
$46,348,282
Breakdown by donor
$NaNM
Elizabeth Warren
$35,654,984
Breakdown by donor
$NaNM
Pete Buttigieg
$32,337,554
Breakdown by donor
$NaNM
Kamala Harris
$25,090,948
Breakdown by donor
$NaNM
Joe Biden
$22,043,829
Breakdown by donor
$NaNM
John Delaney
$20,183,997
Breakdown by donor
$NaNM
Kirsten Gillibrand
$14,899,167
Breakdown by donor
$NaNM
Beto O’Rourke
$13,020,991
Breakdown by donor
$NaNM
Amy Klobuchar
$12,710,254
Breakdown by donor
$NaNM
Cory Booker
$12,470,615
Breakdown by donor
$NaNM
Tulsi Gabbard
$5,562,974
Breakdown by donor
$NaNM
Jay Inslee
$5,308,246
Breakdown by donor
$NaNM
Andrew Yang
$4,614,905
Breakdown by donor
$NaNM
Julián Castro
$3,906,390
Breakdown by donor
$NaNM
Michael Bennet
$3,506,968
Breakdown by donor
$NaNM
John Hickenlooper
$3,171,629
Breakdown by donor
$NaNM
Marianne Williamson
$3,070,683
Breakdown by donor
$NaNM
Steve Bullock
$2,071,211
Breakdown by donor
$NaNM
Seth Moulton
$1,940,003
Breakdown by donor
$NaNM
Bill de Blasio
$1,087,564
Breakdown by donor
$NaNM
Tim Ryan
$889,399
Breakdown by donor
$NaNM
Mike Gravel
$209,261
Breakdown by donor
$NaNM
Burn rate in the first two quarters
But how fast candidates are bringing money in isn’t the only relevant measure here; it also helps to know how fast money is flowing out. Burn rate — total spent divided by total raised — measures how quickly candidates are spending their money, and cash on hand shows how much of a buffer a campaign has socked away, which could help it weather a rough patch if costs rise or donations plummet. Presidential campaigns raise and spend money faster than a Silicon Valley startup, so having a safety net is essential to keeping operations up in the lean times.
| name | total raised | total spent | cash on hand | burn rate | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Andrew Yang | $4.6M | $3.8M | $0.9M | 82.5% | |
| Marianne Williamson | 3.1 | 2.5 | 0.5 | 82.2 | |
| Jay Inslee | 5.3 | 4.1 | 1.2 | 77.7 | |
| Julián Castro | 3.9 | 3 | 1.1 | 76.1 | |
| John Hickenlooper | 3.2 | 2.3 | 0.8 | 73.6 | |
| John Delaney | 20.2 | 13 | 7.4 | 64.5 | |
| Seth Moulton | 1.9 | 1.2 | 0.7 | 62.7 | |
| Tim Ryan | 0.9 | 0.6 | 0.3 | 62.3 | |
| Beto O’Rourke | 13 | 7.8 | 5.2 | 60.1 | |
| Cory Booker | 12.5 | 7.1 | 5.4 | 57 | |
| Tulsi Gabbard | 5.6 | 3.1 | 2.4 | 56.2 | |
| Joe Biden | 22 | 11.1 | 10.9 | 50.6 | |
| Amy Klobuchar | 12.7 | 6 | 6.7 | 47.2 | |
| Kamala Harris | 25.1 | 11.8 | 13.3 | 47.1 | |
| Mike Gravel | 0.2 | 0.1 | 0.1 | 45.2 | |
| Kirsten Gillibrand | 14.9 | 6.7 | 8.2 | 44.7 | |
| Elizabeth Warren | 35.7 | 15.9 | 19.8 | 44.5 | |
| Bernie Sanders | 46.3 | 19.1 | 27.3 | 41.2 | |
| Michael Bennet | 3.5 | 1.3 | 2.2 | 37.5 | |
| Bill de Blasio | 1.1 | 0.4 | 0.7 | 33 | |
| Pete Buttigieg | 32.3 | 9.7 | 22.7 | 29.9 | |
| Steve Bullock | 2.1 | 0.6 | 1.5 | 28.1 |
There aren’t any objectively good or bad numbers here. But according to an analysis by Echelon Insights, the average presidential campaign had a 69 percent burn rate through Sept. 30 of the year before the election.
Comparing the parties in 2019 so far
The Democratic Party is putting a lot of weight on grassroots fundraising this election cycle. That’s in part because of ActBlue, an online Democratic fundraising tool that has raised over $3 billion for the party by helping to fuel a surge of small-dollar donations.1Thanks in part to ActBlue, Democrats running for Congress raised over three times as much from small donors between January 2017 and Sept. 2018 as they did over the same 21-month span in the 2014 election cycle. When the Democratic National Committee made fundraising a criterion in determining which candidates qualify for the party’s first debates, it specified a minimum number of donors per candidate but not a minimum dollar number, prioritizing candidates who could demonstrate broad national support even if their fundraising totals were relatively low.2Candidates who get donations from at least 65,000 people (including a minimum of 200 donors from each of at least 20 states) will be eligible to take the stage in the first two debates. Candidates must collect donations from at least 130,000 people, plus clear a polling threshold, to participate in the third debate.
No one is doing better with small donors than Bernie Sanders, who raised $27.8 million, or 60.1 percent of his total, from donors who gave $200 or less.3The FEC rules allow campaigns to report less information about donors who give a total of $200 or less.
Overall this year, 39.8 percent of Democrats’ funding came from small donors. For Trump, 14.3 percent of his total haul came from people who gave less than $200. Here’s the breakdown for all the Democrats as a group and for Trump on his own for the first and second quarters.4Trump has been fundraising for his re-election campaign since he was inaugurated in 2017, so his totals for this year represent a fraction of his total fundraising.
Democratic field $TKTK
$NaNM
Trump $TKTK
Trump’s 2019 transfer money was raised in partnership with the Republican Party
$NaNM
Big donors Individuals who gave more than $200
Small donors Individuals who gave a total of $200 or less
Self-funding Money the candidate donated or loaned to the campaign
PACs Independent fundraising groups
Transfers Money moved over from past campaigns or joint fundraising efforts
Other All other categories
Where this year’s (big) donors live
Where is all this money coming from? For now, we can only tell you where candidates’ big donors live. The FEC requires candidates to provide the names and addresses of donors who give more than $200. When we divide the total value of big-dollar donations from each state by an estimate of how many Democratic voters live there,5We’re dividing the total value of donations by the number of registered voters in the state according to a 2018 Census Bureau report, and then dividing that number by the percentage of the state who said they were Democrats or Democratic-leaning independents in a 2017 Gallup poll. Washington, D.C., gave the most on a dollars-per-Democrat basis.
Which states gave the most in the first two quarters, sized by dollars per Democrat*
| Dollars per Dem. | Total |
|---|---|
| $ |
*To get the dollars-per-Democrat figure, the total dollar value of donations from the state was divided by the number of registered voters in the state, and that number was divided by the percentage of the state that identified as a Democrat or Democratic-leaning independent in a 2017 Gallup poll.
A look at the early-primary states can show us which candidates are resonating with key voters there. In Iowa, Pete Buttigieg received the most big-dollar donations so far this year. Pete Buttigiegalso led in New Hampshire.
So, how much does all this matter? FiveThirtyEight’s own Maggie Koerth-Baker wrote in 2018 that fundraising is an inefficient metric for assessing general elections, but it’s pretty useful for gauging the primaries. Winning the nomination requires building name recognition and demonstrating viability, particularly in a field with over a dozen candidates. A great fundraising quarter signals to voters — and the DNC — that a candidate is on track to do just that.
CORRECTION (July 16, 2019, 5:10 p.m.): In an earlier version of this story, sections labeled as covering this year erroneously used fundraising totals for the full election cycle so far, dating back to 2017. The story has been updated throughout to show 2019 numbers only.
CORRECTION (Feb. 1, 2020, 7:30 p.m.): Due to a coding error affecting candidates who began fundraising before 2019, a previous version of this story gave incorrect cash-on-hand numbers for John Delaney and Andrew Yang.
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