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Shortly after the Democratic presidential primary debate on Saturday night, Senator Bernie Sanders’s campaign announced that he had outpaced Barack Obama’s record for the number of contributions in a presidential race, with more than 2.2 million donations.

Mr. Obama’s record was 2,209,636 donations, according to a release from Mr. Sanders. Aides to the senator and Democratic presidential candidate suggested that it happened during the debate Saturday, and that the average donation during that period was $25 or less.

The amount would be significant not just for the number of contributors, but also because of the possibility that Mr. Sanders could beat Hillary Clinton for contributions in the final fund-raising quarter of the year.

In its lawsuit against the Democratic National Committee last week, the Sanders campaign argued a hardship case in seeking to end its suspension to access voter data over a breach. Mr. Sanders’s aides were found to have conducted targeted searches of Mrs. Clinton’s proprietary voter file data after a vendor, NGP VAN, accidentally dropped a firewall that kept campaigns from viewing one another’s information.

Four users associated with the Sanders team conducted searches of the data; information was copied and saved in new folders; and a one-page data summary was exported, according to the party committee and NGP VAN.

The Sanders campaign argued that the suspension was unduly harsh because, it said, it was costing $600,000 in lost money raised per day, which the team used its voter files to harvest. That amounts to more than $3 million a week.

In the last fund-raising quarter, Mr. Sanders raised $26 million, and Mrs. Clinton raised $28 million. The senator began holding larger, structured fund-raisers, but his donor base is primarily small-dollar.