The Daily Background

Earlier today I reported:

Barack Obama’s presidential campaign was expected to announce Wednesday that they had received donations from a record 500,000 donors, most of them small, in the first 51 days of the year.

Before Obama’s decisive wins in Wisconsin and Hawaii, the campaign had received only about 460,000 donations this year. The publicity the campaign received in the mere hours after his wins however propelled them well over the 500K mark (which they had hoped to meet before March 4th when Texas and Ohio, Rhode Island and Vermont cast their ballots).

Obama has raised about $150M since he announced his candidacy in February 2007, including $36M in January.

Hours later, Obama’s campaign did indeed announce that they’d surpassed the 500K mark. What’s bigger though is that since I wrote my report, another approximately 30,000 people have donated to the campaign.

Why? Obama sent out another email to his list saying that the campaign had a new goal: to reach 1 million unique donors by March 4th. Here’s the gist of the email:

We learned something extraordinary since I wrote to you last night.

We’ve crunched all the numbers and discovered that we are within striking distance of something historic: one million people donating to this campaign.

Think about that … nearly one million people taking ownership of this movement, five dollars or twenty-five dollars at a time.

We’re already more than 900,000 strong, including over half-a-million donating so far this year. This unprecedented foundation of support has built a campaign that has shaken the status quo and proven that ordinary people can compete in a political process too often dominated by special interests.

Unlike Senator Clinton or Senator McCain, we haven’t taken a dime from Washington lobbyists or special interest PACs. Our campaign is responsible to no one but the people.

One million donors would be a remarkable feat — something that’s never been done before in a presidential primary and something no one ever thought would be possible for us. And your generosity made it possible.

An ambitious goal to be sure. They’ve already got the most donors for a primary campaign, but can they get a million between now and March 4th with no elections at all in between? Track their progress in real time…

Filed under: Z-TDB Blog