In the back of a Concord, New Hampshire, school gymnasium, as Bernie Sanders gave a triumphant speech after winning the New Hampshire Democratic primary, 24-year-old Kenneth Pennington stood staring at his smartphone, watching the numbers climb. Pennington, the campaign’s digital director, saw thousands of people cramming onto the Sanders website at once, frantically trying to donate to his campaign. In one minute alone, 2,689 people had donated an average of $34.
“It was, obviously, a big day,” said Pennington, who found himself jumping up and down as the contributions rolled in.
Sanders has no official finance director, but with the help of people like Pennington, who built his first website at age 12, he has created a fundraising juggernaut that has fueled his unexpectedly competitive race for president. The network his team built now threatens the once-daunting Clinton fundraising model, which the family perfected over years of Beverly Hills dinners, Hamptons summer parties, and rewards for donors like nights in the Lincoln Bedroom.
Sanders, the Vermont senator, has raised some $96 million to Hillary Clinton’s $127 million, but he is gaining ground after raising $5 million more than she did last month. His operation is also highly efficient — Sanders simply asks his small donors to give online, and they do, while Clinton has left the campaign trail repeatedly to fly to other cities for receptions with bigger contributors.
In the 48 hours after his 22-point victory in New Hampshire, for example, the senator’s campaign raised $8 million online.
“I don’t feel like a finance director, but it may have turned out that way,” said Pennington, who taught himself how to build websites as a middle school student in El Dorado Hills, California.
In an election cycle when just 158 families provided half of the early money for the presidential campaign, the success of the Sanders operation has startled some political operatives, especially those who are veterans of campaign fundraising efforts.
The competition between Sanders and Clinton is as much about a collision of fundraising cultures as it is about dollars: The Sanders team runs a heavily digital, bare-bones operation, stoked by social media and credit-card transactions. The Clinton camp also has a substantial digital fundraising operation, but so far has relied more on in-person appeals to richer individuals, an approach that requires more elaborate planning, travel, invitations, handshakes and picture taking.
Clinton has spent the past 10 months crisscrossing the country and attending more than 230 fundraisers, asking for checks of up to $2,700, the maximum contribution allowed in the primary campaign. Some 24,000 people and political action committees have given that maximum, providing her with a base of about $65 million for her campaign.
Among supporters of Sanders, by contrast, only 649 donors have provided the maximum amount, and the average donation is about $27. That means that most of his donors — more than 1.3 million so far, according to the campaign — can continue to contribute as the primary race moves to Nevada, South Carolina and the 11 states that hold contests on March 1.
Clinton is eager to show that she has generated money from small donors even if she trails Sanders. Contributions under $200 each accounted for almost 20 percent of the total given to the Clinton campaign in 2015.
“My 750,000 donors have contributed a million and a half donations,” she said at the Democratic debate Thursday night.
But as a result of her reliance on traditional fundraising events, she has been forced to interrupt campaigning to fly off to entertain potential contributors. A trip to an event hosted by an investment firm in Philadelphia just before the Iowa caucuses, for example, played into Sanders’ critique of her as someone who is too cozy with the financial industry and corporate elites.
Still, Andy Spahn, a major Los Angeles fundraiser for Barack Obama who is supporting Clinton, said a balanced approach was best. Spahn likened Clinton’s campaign model to Obama’s in 2008. In that election, Obama shattered fundraising records, bringing in roughly $750 million, peeling away wealthy donors like music producer David Geffen from the Clintons, but also tapping small-dollar donors online.
“Hillary has a healthy mix of traditional bundlers and online, low-dollar donors, which will be necessary to win in November,” Spahn said.
But in an interview, Pennington suggested that depending on affluent donors was anachronistic. The Clintons pioneered that path some 30 years ago, building an expansive network of Southern trial lawyers, Hollywood producers and Wall Street executives who found a gracious recipient in Bill Clinton and became the powerhouses of Democratic giving in their generation.
“If we elect Bernie Sanders, I think this kind of high-dollar fundraising will be extinct,” Pennington said, “because if we are able to get serious campaign finance reform, it will no longer be able to go out and beg for money from multimillionaires at white-tablecloth dinners. They should be scared of this.”
Not every candidate has the mass youth appeal of Sanders, however, and as long as the current campaign finance system exists, bigger donors are likely to maintain a role.
Alan Patricof, a New York investor who has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for the Clintons’ races over the years, criticized Sanders, saying he was making big promises to potential donors, like free college, that he is unlikely to fulfill. Patricof compared the pitch to a race for student-body president. “You are sitting in a fifth-grade classroom and someone walks in and says: ‘I’m running for president of the school. Everybody gets a fudge sundae,’” he said.
Hillary Clinton, he added, “comes in and says we have to brush up on our capitals and memorize the Constitution.”