Sanders received almost 900,000 contributions from 525,000 individual donors, his campaign manager, Faiz Shakir, said. The average donation was $20, compared with $27 in Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign, he said.
Shakir said that a majority of Sanders’ donors were under the age of 39 and that 20 percent of all donors had not contributed to Sanders’ previous campaigns. He said that 88 percent of the total raised in the first quarter came from donors giving $200 or less.
Sanders’ announcement of his fundraising for the first quarter of the year had been highly anticipated, as he was expected to reveal a formidable total. Presidential candidates must report their first-quarter fundraising to the Federal Election Commission by April 15, but they can choose to disclose information before that deadline. The announcement Tuesday offered a chance for Sanders’ team to showcase the breadth of support for his campaign.
His total exceeds those of the two other candidates who have already announced their fundraising numbers for the first quarter of the year: Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., and Pete Buttigieg, mayor of South Bend, Indiana.
Harris’ campaign said Monday night that she had raised $12 million in the first quarter, while Buttigieg said early Monday that he had raised more than $7 million. Both candidates entered the race in January, several weeks before Sanders announced his candidacy.
Former Rep. Beto O’Rourke of Texas, who entered the race in March and has been a prolific online fundraiser, has yet to announce his haul for the quarter.
The fundraising totals are important beyond the symbolic value they carry for candidates who can point to large numbers of supporters. The Iowa caucuses are still 10 months away, meaning that Democratic candidates will need to be able to fund their campaigns for a long stretch of time just to make it to the first nominating contest.
Sanders posted a bigger opening number than he did in the last presidential race, when he raised about $14 million in the quarter that covered April through June of 2015. Shakir said it took 146 days, or about 21 weeks, for Sanders to reach 900,000 donations in that campaign.
But the amount raised by Sanders this quarter was not off the charts for a Democratic presidential hopeful. Hillary Clinton raised about $47 million in her first quarter as a candidate in the 2016 campaign, though unlike Sanders, she relied heavily on big donations.
Sanders began the 2020 race with the benefit of an enormous donor base that he developed in his primary campaign against Clinton, when he raised well over $200 million. After jumping into the 2020 race Feb. 19, he quickly reminded his rivals of his large following, collecting $5.9 million in the first 24 hours and a total of $10 million within a week. (Only O’Rourke disclosed a bigger 24-hour haul, with $6.1 million.)
The Sanders campaign had set a goal of receiving 1 million individual donations by the end of the first quarter. The campaign fell short of that goal, but Shakir expressed no regret about having aimed for it. “It was important to us to set an ambitious goal,” he said.
Sanders’ financial resources go beyond the money he has received since entering the presidential race. Like others running for president who have previously run for federal office, he can make use of funds that he had raised in earlier campaigns. He began the 2020 race with $14 million available for his use, Shakir said.
Shakir said the new fundraising total showed that the movement Sanders began in his 2016 campaign was still gaining steam. He noted that there had been questions from pundits about whether that would be the case: “Is this movement sustaining? Is it still there?”
“The answer is a resounding yes,” he said. “It is still strong, and it is still growing.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.