Hillary Clinton’s major donors want her to show more “fire” in Tuesday night's Democratic presidential debate to halt Bernie Sander’s grass-roots momentum and populist fundraising appeal.

But the Vermont senator’s campaign sees the debate as a major opportunity to cash in, campaign sources tell POLITICO, and, if recent precedent holds, it could yield a multimillion-dollar surge from activists giving $10 or $20 each.


With both candidates set to release fundraising totals later this week, small donors have provided the overwhelming majority of the $41 million raised by Sanders through the end of last month — a tally that’s expected to exceed every campaign except Clinton’s. Her campaign pulled in $75 million between mid-April and the end of September. But a much larger percentage came from donors who each gave close to $2,700, which is the maximum that any one donor can contribute for the primary election.

Clinton’s big-money backers contend she could tap into the small-donor fervor behind Sanders and fire up her own base if she displayed more emotion on the debate stage, according to POLITICO interviews with 10 leading donors and fundraisers who work closely with the Clinton campaign. They see her best approach as a tricky balance between reaching out to Sanders’ populist base, while still casting herself as the most electable Democrat ― which means also aggressively rebutting Republican attacks over her private email use.

“There’s a deep hunger for more action and more fire in belly, and lots of worry all the energy is with Bernie,” said a major Clinton bundler in New York. “Everyone is talking about that,” said the bundler. While noting that most major donors still don’t see Sanders as likely to win the Democratic nomination, the bundler added, “Donors are the base, and they like red meat the same way the activist wing of the party does. … Donors and bundlers are all momentum people like everyone else.”

In the debate run-up, Clinton’s big-money fundraisers have focused on rebutting criticism that “Hillary isn’t a true progressive,” as her super PAC enforcer David Brock put it in a Monday speech to wealthy San Franciscans. Clinton, he assured them, “is running to strengthen middle-class families, a platform that speaks not only to Democratic primary voters but also to the general electorate.”

Jay Jacobs, a Democratic donor who held a June fundraiser for Clinton, said the debate offers a chance for her to demonstrate to Sanders’ supporters that the two candidates are not far apart on domestic policy.

“Other than the deliveries being different, the deliverables are not that different between her and Sen. Sanders,” said Jacobs. “There are obviously some policy distinctions, but the thing that is not recognized enough is that Hillary Clinton for her whole career has been a progressive.”

Nonetheless, he predicted that Clinton would not “engage negatively” with Sanders, or the other debate candidates ― former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley and former Sens. Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island and Jim Webb of Virginia. “That has not been her approach,” Jacobs said.

Clinton may have helped set the stage for a debate-night appeal to liberal activists with recent policy pronouncements, including announcing her opposition to the proposals for the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal and the Keystone XL pipeline.

And while some of the donors surveyed were heartened by the moves, others worried they may have offended the sorts of major donors upon whom Clinton has come to rely.

“You’ve got a number of business people who aren’t happy about those, who believe that it would probably be better for business if she was supporting Keystone and the TPP,” said one finance executive who is a major Clinton donor. But the executive predicted major donors won’t abandon Clinton over a few issues, explaining they “aren’t having a hard time deciding between Hillary and Bernie. That’s not what this is about. This is about winning over people who are supporting Bernie Sanders,” including grass-roots activists who give small donations. “He raised $25 million last quarter, and it was mostly from people who gave $10 or $20, so he could raise $25 million again next quarter. That’s who she needs.”

Clinton’s campaign has invited a handful of her biggest donors to attend the debate, but it also has worked to cultivate small donors and is expected to send fundraising solicitations pegged to the debate.

Big donations are typically solicited in individual pitches by candidates or their campaigns, often through fundraising events, which are costly and time-consuming to plan. Clinton has held dozens of fundraisers, compared with Sanders' seven. And when a donor reaches the $2,700 limit, the campaign can’t go back to them for another primary donation.

Small donors, by contrast, are much more likely to donate online in response to emotional appeals pegged to news events that pit candidates against one another ― and the campaign can keep going back to the same donors over and over.

Sanders' donors, who are giving an average of $30-a-piece, according to his campaign, last month gave $1.2 million in two days in response to a fundraising plea for them to “fight back against … ugly attacks” from a Clinton-linked opposition research PAC. Then, on the final day of last month, they combined to generate another $2 million when the campaign signaled that it was within striking distance of outraising Clinton in the third quarter.

Those appeals yielded some of the biggest numbers ever processed by ActBlue, the nonprofit donation processing service used by the Sanders campaign and many other Democratic candidates and committees.

“We’ve worked with a lot of different campaigns and committees, and he’s certainly breaking a lot of records on our platform,” said Erin Hill, executive director of ActBlue. In the decade since it started, the service has helped raise money for more than 11,000 liberal campaigns and committees, but the two days after Sanders email about the Clinton-linked oppo brought the highest volumes ever seen at ActBlue, with 180 contributions per minute coming through the platform to Sanders’ campaign at one point.

“One of the central precepts to online fundraising is urgency. People like to feel part of these big, viral moments,” Hill said. “I would imagine that larger donors do similar things, but with online fundraising there is that immediacy, where you don’t have to pick up the phone or go to a fundraising event.”

Fundraising appeals from Sanders during Tuesday’s showdown have the potential to far exceed either of his previous record hauls. Not only has Sanders’ campaign been growing its small donor base and perfecting the messaging behind its pitches, but the debate offers the promise of what fundraising specialists describe as a perfect “viral moment.”

Almost all the presidential candidates on both sides of the aisle have worked to varying degrees to cultivate small donors, recognizing that — even in the age of unlimited donations to super PACs — there’s value in being able to tap a continuing stream of small donations throughout the campaign.

The campaigns of Clinton, Sanders and O’Malley are organizing debate watching parties across the country at which attendees might reasonably be expected to respond to email fundraising appeals. The Sanders campaign already has more than 3,000 such parties planned, while the O’Malley campaign has planned more than 70 such gatherings, including 35 in Iowa and seven in New Hampshire.

Sanders’ supporters also see the debate as an opportunity for him to make inroads among major donors, some of whom may get their first prolonged impression of the senator, who has almost entirely avoided high-dollar fundraising.

“Just being who he is is going to get him an audience that he hasn’t had, and a lot of the scary stories and ideas about him will be put to rest. He is not going to seem crazy to people,” said Deborah Sagner, a New Jersey real estate executive and philanthropist who is influential in liberal major donor circles. “I’m talking about some donors who still think only Hillary can beat a Republican.”

She said she has been sending polling and news articles about Sanders’ rise to major donors who are growing increasingly amenable to supporting him. “He is doing a good job at calming those waters,” she said, suggesting he has more of a chance to eat into Clinton’s donor base than she does into his.

“I think the people who are doubtful about her are going to just assume that everything that she says comes from focus groups that she’s done.”

Annie Karni contributed to this report.

