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Yes, Obama's fundraising was a big deal, but the real story is the bodies

Submitted by Soren Dayton on Mon, 11/24/2008 - 21:51
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I am bewildered that some people try to make the arguments that they do. The Campaign Finance Institute argues that, "[i]t turns out that Barack Obama's donors may not have been quite as different as we had thought."

Ummm. Except that there were 3.1m of them. And that's not a trivial difference. But it doesn't stop there.

CFI notes that there was a significant difference in people who started out small and moved into a larger donor group:

Many of the repeat donors who started off small ended up in the $201-$999 middle range. Among Obama's total pool of 403,000 disclosed donors on August 31, more than half (about 212,000) started off by giving undisclosed contributions of $200 or less. About 93,000 of these repeaters gave in cumulative amounts of no more than $400 for the full primary season. Another 106,000 repeaters ended up between $401 and $999. By comparison, Clinton and McCain each had about 100,000 donors in the entire $201-$999 middle range, and for them the number included both repeaters and one-time givers.

So what we found here is not only that there were more donors, but the Obama campaign did a better job of converting their one-time donors into repeated donors. Oh, and, by the way, they did a better job of turning thier interested observers (12 million on the mailing list) into donors (1/4 donated)

So it wasn't just a difference in mass -- although that's significant enough -- but in process.

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Timing is everything...

Submitted by Captin Sarcastic on Tue, 11/25/2008 - 12:45.

 the Obama campaign did a better job of converting their one-time donors into repeated donors.

The Obama campaign capitalized on a frustrated electorate, and instantly timed their money requests to events in the real world.

When Sarah Palin spoke, she was either effective, which scared Obama supporters, or offensive, which offended Obama supporters, but in either case, within minutes of events the Obama campaign would provide supporters with an outlet to channel these feelings. Namely their credit cards were the outlet and the Obama campaign was the channel. Every negative ad that the McCain camp put up, whether it had two airings in Saginaw, or was internet only, was shown or described to Obama supporters by the Obama campaign, and again, they were given an opportunity to respond with cash.

McCain and Republicans helped Obama raise money, and for every voter a negative ad may have pushed away from McCain, the ad helped Obama raise enough money to win back two supporters.

I don't know if this would have worked with a less riled up opposition to Republicans, but I guess that's the nature of success, being prepared opportunity presents itself.

 As I said previously, with this kind of reversal of the effects of negative campaigning, it's just possible that we may see that particular style of campaigning reach the point of diminishing returns. It's too early to tell, but we can hope.

oh, and for those who accurately remind us that Obama actually ran more negative ads, there are two reasons why McCain could not capitalize in the same way Obama did, one was the campaign was not as effective, and the other was the nature of the ads, they just were not bombastic enough to fire people up. Negatives ads about policy... boring. Negative ads reminding us of the "Obama is a Muslim" meme like the "Who is Barack Obama" ads... exciting. Remember, the chain mails that asserted Obama was a Muslim were also titled, "Who is Barack Obama". So right or wrong, Obama supporters saw this as an implicit attempt to advance that meme. That was a call to credit card action for them.