Don’t believe the small donor hype.

Suggestions by Hillary Clinton and other presidential candidates that their campaigns are being powered by massive grassroots fundraising engines were largely spin for most of the 2016 prospects, a POLITICO analysis of reports filed this week shows.


Of the $127 million raised for the primary election by the 15 candidates who disclosed their finances to the Federal Election Commission, less than 30 percent came from donors contributing $200 or less, according to analyses of the reports by POLITICO and the Campaign Finance Institute.

By contrast, the analyses found, 42 percent of the candidates’ primary-election cash came from donors giving the maximum primary donation of $2,700.

Yet, the candidates are seeking to downplay their reliance on major donors to their campaigns and supportive super PACs – often relying on misleading math tricks to make the case that their efforts are funded by regular folks. There are a few reasons: they don’t want to appear beholden to the very rich increasingly subsidizing presidential politics, and their operatives believe that small donors will continue donating throughout the campaign, and can eventually be mobilized as part of the campaign’s activist army to help get out the vote.

While the potential of small donors helped power Barack Obama’s historic 2008 campaign, the financial benefits are not immediately apparent for most presidential candidates this time around. In fact, some of the candidates who most touted their small-donor cred raised relatively insignificant percentages of their cash from small donations.

Clinton’s fundraising juggernaut of a campaign for the Democratic nomination, which repeatedly pledged to build “a grassroots-driven organization,” revealed in its FEC report that 67 percent of its field-leading $47 million in primary-election cash came from donors contributing $2,700 or more. Only 18 percent came from donations of $200 or less.

That puts Clinton roughly in the middle of pack as far as the percentage of cash raised from small donors during the second-quarter fundraising period that ran from the beginning of April through the end of last month.

At the low end was Jeb Bush, whose campaign paced the field of Republican presidential hopefuls by raising $11.4 million in the second quarter. But only three percent of that came from donors who gave $200 or less. By contrast, Bush raised 88 percent of his cash from donors who gave the primary maximum of $2,700 or more – the highest such percentage in the field.

By far the leader in small-dollar fundraising was Bernie Sanders. His insurgent campaign for the Democratic nomination raised more than 75 percent of its $13.6-million haul from donors who gave $200 or less, versus only 2 percent from maximum donors.

Sanders’ small-dollar fundraising provides a source of continuing revenue unavailable to candidates who rely more heavily on donors who hit the contribution limit early and are barred from giving more. But the Vermont Senator – whose campaign centers partly on reducing the influence of big-money in politics – has put himself at a financial disadvantage by rejecting big-donor-funded super PACs of the sort formed by allies of Clinton, Bush and most of the other candidates in the field.

Yet, representatives for Clinton and Bush rejected suggestions that their super PAC support or their campaign’s FEC reports undercut their messages of grassroots momentum.

Allie Brandenburger, a spokeswoman for Bush, said the former Florida governor “is very encouraged by the depth of the support for Gov. Bush’s message across the nation, evidenced by the contributions received from individuals in all 50 states and Washington, D.C.”

And Clinton spokesman Josh Schwerin said “the $8 million we raised in low-dollar contributions was more than many Republican campaigns raised in total,” he said.

The Clinton and Bush campaigns both offered up supporting numbers.

A Bush campaign source said that 61 percent of the campaign’s donors gave $200 or less, while the Clinton campaign said it had 250,000 donors and that 94 percent of its donations came in amounts of $250 or less

Those claims – which are similar to metrics offered by other campaigns – cannot be independently verified from FEC reports. The reporting rules do not require campaigns to list individual donations from supporters who gave $200 or less. Additionally, campaigns can, and do, use fundraising techniques intended to inflate the small donation numbers — sometimes without substantially boosting their overall cash.

The Clinton campaign for instance sent out rafts of fundraising emails pleading for donors to give $1 online donations. Each such contribution would count as a distinct donation, but would add little to the campaign’s net revenue stream, even before accounting for credit card processing fees.

In an email to supporters sent the week before the second-quarter books closed, the campaign asked for $1 donations and laid out its small donor theory. “The true measurement of our campaign’s strength is the number of people” who donate, which can be used to indicate “the breadth and depth of this grassroots campaign.” The campaign’s FEC report, according to the email, is “like our final exams for the quarter – and the report we file determines our grade. We get an ‘A’ if we can show that this campaign has an incredible army of grassroots supporters who care enough to make an investment in the race. And we get an ‘F’ if folks like you sit on the sidelines instead of putting some skin in the game.”

Fred Wertheimer, founder of the campaign finance watchdog group Democracy 21, said it’s becoming increasingly common for campaigns that are sensitive about their small-dollar fundraising totals to instead highlight their small donor number.

“That doesn’t really tell me the story because how much did they get from small donors versus large donors is important,” he said, adding that such math tricks mask the declining power of small donors. “Particularly in presidential campaigns, the trend has been moving away from small donors,” he said, bemoaning the rise of super PACs.

“Maxed out donors are becoming like Triple-A baseball,” said Wertheimer. “They are not unimportant but they are dwarfed by super PAC donors.”

But Michael Malbin, executive director of the Campaign Finance Institute, said that low-dollar fundraising has always started out slow in presidential campaigns. And, though he acknowledged small donations may be less important financially in the super PAC era, he cautioned the candidates against writing off small donors.

“The incentive for small donor databases always went beyond the money to mobilization,” he said. “Single-candidate super PACs will make the money proportionately less important, but not the need for grassroots mobilization.”