The NPR Politics Podcast - 2020 Update: First Quarter Fundraising, What The Numbers Tell Us And What They Don't

Episode Date: April 3, 2019

The first quarter for campaign fundraising ended March 31 and although campaigns aren't required to report their totals to the Federal Election Commission until April 15, several campaigns have already released their figures. What do these early numbers signify for campaigns? This episode: Congressional reporter Kelsey Snell, national political correspondent Mara Liasson and political editor Domenico Montanaro. Email the show at [e-mail]. Find and support your local public radio station at npr.org/stations.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hey, Tam, guess what? What, Scott? Big news. We're doing another live podcast on the road. We're going to be in Philadelphia. In fact, we are going to be there on April 26th to record a live podcast on stage all about the 2020 election. We just did this in Atlanta. It was great. But here is the catch. We need your help to make sure it's the best podcast possible. And the way to do that is to head over to NPR Presents dot org and grab a ticket to be in the audience. That's Friday, April 26th in Philadelphia. We'll see you there.

Hi, this is Catherine calling from Oakland, California, where I am standing outside of the Alameda courthouse where I'm just going into jury duty, doing my civic duty. You are listening to the NPR Politics Podcast, which was recorded at 11.09am on Wednesday, April 3rd. Keep in mind that things may have changed by the time you hear it. Keep up with all of NPR's political coverage on the NPR One app, NPR.org, and of course, your local station, which for me is KQED. Okay, here's the show. I have never been chosen for jury duty. I've been called in three times and never chosen. How about you guys? I can get out of it. I've been chosen. I've been called once and dismissed. We're all going to go to Mara for tips.

Either it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Kelsey Snell. I cover Congress. I'm Domenico Montanaro, political editor. I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. And we're here to talk about money, campaign money. First quarter for campaign fundraising ended on March 31st. And slowly but surely, candidates are releasing how much money they've raised so far. And who says they have raised what, Domenico? The quarter ended on Sunday, March 31st. So that's when a lot of the

campaigns, they know that they've locked in a certain amount of money. They have to report to the Federal Election Commission by April 15th. So between now and then, what we're going to get is essentially campaigns putting a political number out to say, this is how much money they raised. This is how well they're doing. And the candidates we hear from want some kind of momentum. So who has said what they rate? Well, so far, the biggest number that we've seen has come from Bernie Sanders. Sanders has raised eighteen point two million dollars from some nine hundred thousand contributions, almost a million, which is what their goal was. They came up a little short of that. They like to humble brag on their phone call about how they came up just a little short, but we wanted to set ambitious goals, don't we all? Yeah, that's how I think about working out, about dieting. So they got, though, individual

contributions from about 525,000 people. 20% of those were new, and they said about 20,000 of those were Republicans. So that's one 20,000 of those were Republicans. So that's one. We've heard from three people so far. Who else is out there? Kamala Harris, the senator from California, said she's raised $12 million. Big state. She knows a lot of big donors. And the big surprise was South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, who raised $7 million, a pretty big amount for a guy who not a lot of people knew, frankly, before he even did this CNN town hall a few weeks ago, where he gained even half a million more Twitter followers and apparently lots of donations. Yeah, people have been calling that what the Buttigieg bump

or the Buttigieg buzz. He's probably developed more buzz for himself than any other candidate, impressed a lot of people in the town halls. He's kind of the it candidate right now. Yeah. And I had one Democratic strategist told me that in the end, maybe Buttigieg isn't the guy who wins and maybe Elizabeth Warren isn't the person who wins. But when it comes to both of these candidates, whoever the eventual nominee is, will have their head filled with mostly Buttigieg and Warren ideas. Well, I'm really glad you mentioned Elizabeth Warren, because, Mara, why are we only seeing three people? They are not the only three people running for president, as we know from just watching TV. I think that we can rest assured that if some of the other candidates had eye-popping numbers

like these, they would also be releasing them in advance of April 15th. Elizabeth Warren has lagged in fundraising. She hasn't been able to raise the big amounts that Bernie Sanders had, even though she has been around. Now, she hasn't run before. One of the reasons that Bernie Sanders could raise the money he did is not only does he have a devoted following, but he has an incredible list because he ran before. You have to have an infrastructure to raise money. She didn't have that, but she's also been considered a kind of fundraising disappointment. And she has decided, as Domenico mentioned, she is eschewing the kind of one-on-one private fundraisers, big money. She's not going to do that. Maybe that was just out of convenience and she wasn't doing very well in that anyway, but it did cause a rift in her campaign with some of her aides who felt that was just out of convenience and she wasn't doing very well in that anyway. But it did cause a rift in her campaign with some of her aides who felt that was a bad idea. Well, some of it could be her policies. I mean, if you look at the fact that she, more than almost any other candidate, has basically said, I've got all of the regulations lined up. I know exactly where I want to go. I know

exactly how I want to tweak up the SEC, for example, the Securities and Exchange Commission to go and regulate Wall Street. Well, a lot of money that goes to campaigns comes from big donors on Wall Street. And she only raised about $300,000 in her first partial day running as a candidate. And, you know, look, let's see if she winds up doing better. But the thing is, with such a crowded field and Bernie Sanders really having taken the limelight of the sort of the progressive grassroots base, he's really been able to supercharge that energy. And a lot of people wondering if Warren may have missed her chance in 2016 because she was the progressive star and really ceded that mantle to Bernie Sanders. Right. And in that lane, in that progressive lane, if it's a Warren versus Sanders fight, so far, he's winning. So far.

So far. I want to go back to a little bit more about who these donors are and what we know about them. But first, I want to ask, what about the opposite side of this? We heard really big numbers from Beto O'Rourke on his first day of fundraising. First day. We haven't seen his first quarter. So is it possible that, you know that people are holding things back because they want to come out with a big bang? Well, or it could be that it's not a lot, like Mara said. Yeah, we don't know.

So because Beto O'Rourke came out with that big number on his first day of $6.1 million, which narrowly beat Bernie Sanders' first one-day total of $5.9 million. So is Beto O'Rourke sitting on some big stash of cash where he's going to then say, hey, blew everyone away? And a part of this is a communication strategy, right, where they sit there and they wonder, where can we sort of interject ourselves in the news cycle to feel like we can make a splash? Because a lot of this really is about momentum. Right. And don't forget, Beto O'Rourke raised more money than any other Senate candidate. Senate candidate, $80 million. We know he has a list. We know he generates excitement. We know he can raise money. So we'll see what happens on April 15th.

The difference there, though, obviously, is that the same people who are giving to Bernie Sanders and Kamala Harris and now Pete Buttigieg were giving to Beto O'Rourke to win the Senate in Texas. Whether or not they want Beto O'Rourke to be president is that sort of threshold he needs to get over. Yeah. And that is exactly kind of what I want to figure out here is who are these people? Are they are these big donors? Are they just everyday people who get really excited about candidates? Do we know that? Well, we know the average donation. We know, I think for Bernie Sanders, it's $20. $20. That's pretty low. So that means they're not big donors.

And it means also the lower the donation, generally, that means you can go back to that same person over and over again. There are people who've signed up for automatic monthly donations to their candidates. Sometimes it's $10. And that is the unique thing that the Sanders campaign has really done this time around, which is get you to sign up for automatic recurring payments so that they can keep going back to you over and over again, because the maximum that you can give in the primary is $2,800. So doing that, and you've got someone giving you 10 bucks or 20 bucks every month, that's a lot of months that you can sustain a candidacy through a long drawn out primary fight. Do we know if people are kind of hedging their bets and saying, I'm going to give a little

bit over here to Buttigieg, a little bit over here to maybe Christian Gillibrand? I mean, it's harder to tell at this point to cross populate without having massive spreadsheets of who all the donors are. And remember, we don't have any of this information for real yet, because none of this is on the Federal Election Commission's website yet. Once all of that is done, I expect that you'll have lots of organizations downloading those lists and crossing over. But I think what you can probably safely think is that there is some crossover, because there are so many people running. I mean, if you look back at past years, for example, Bernie Sanders, what he raised, certainly impressive $18.2 million, but it pales in comparison, frankly, to what Hillary Clinton was able to

raise in 2015, what Hillary Clinton was able to raise in 2007, and what Barack Obama was able to raise in 2007. Now, that 2007-2008 field was also very large. You had almost a dozen Democrats running. You had the opportunity for the money to be spread around. But the difference this time is that you have far less people standing out as the top two or three people who are definitely the candidates who people think are going to win. And I don't know my second point. I'll give you Domenico's second point. Democrats in general, this entire primary field, Democrats are excited, they're enthusiastic, and they are willing to open their wallets. I think the overall fundraising, the fact that it is so spread out, tells you that Democrats are very invested and

energized about this field. I think it tells you a little bit less about drawing from these numbers to who's going to win the nomination. The person who raises the most money early on doesn't necessarily get the nomination. Just ask President Jeb Bush. But right now, you'd have to say that Bernie Sanders, in terms of poll numbers and money raised, is the frontrunner right now. So you are Kamala Harris. You've got your $12 million and you're heading to Iowa. What are you spending your money on and how is it different than, say, Bernie Sanders, who has a whole campaign arm and mechanism left over from the last time he ran and has outraged her? One warning I want to give people is if you think about Scott Walker, who is the former Wisconsin governor, he raised a ton of money in

2015, but he also spent about $90,000 a day and lost. And some of what that money went to, when you talk about what do they spend this stuff on, payroll. The campaign had lots of consultants. There's lots of people who want to feed off a campaign. Look, there are a lot of people who want to be part of a campaign that they know can, there are a lot of people who want to be part of a campaign that they know can spend and raise a lot of money. You got to be leery of what that burn rate is. And I'm going to be really curious to see what the Sanders burn rate is because they have a ton of staff. The fact is these campaigns can spend a lot of money in salary and it depends on how lean they're going to be. And at some point,

when we get closer, the biggest pot of money is going to be on all those TV ads. Okay. And really quick, before we take a break, we have a little bit of breaking news. We found out that Andrew Yang raised $1.7 million. And Andrew Yang, who's a tech startup investor, raised this money from 80,000 donors. That's an average of $18 a donation, less than Bernie Sanders. And he's gained some attention in some circles for his idea of a universal basic income where people would get a fixed amount of money. And he says that he does that because of the coming automation that's likely out of Silicon Valley. And can we say just one little point on a related issue? The Democratic National Committee, for some unknown reason, set the bar for participating in the debates at 65,000 donors.

Totally arbitrary. Which, totally arbitrary, and I'm sure now they are regretting that because everybody's beating it. They should have set it at 650,000 donors. But anyway, so the point is they set the number of donors way too low. And in addition to that 65,000 donors that Mara is talking about, they have to be from a lot of states. They have to be from 20 different states. World's longest debates are coming our way. In the summer. World's most crowded debates. And multiple debates.

Yes, because they have to split them up. They can only fit so many on the stage at once. So they have to have divisions of debates. I think the debates are going to be really interesting and amazing because they're going to be funnels for who can last for very long. I mean, the money we're talking about can be spent very, very quickly. People aren't going to be able to last for very long if they don't do well in those debates, gain more attention and raise more money. And, you know, there's a group called EMILY's List, which supports female pro-choice candidates. And EMILY stands for Early Money is Like Yeast. And that's what Domenico's talking about. Early money is really helpful. The amount

of money you raise is not a predictor of whether you're going to be the nominee or not, but it really helps jumpstart a campaign. Now I'm hungry and want bread. Well, now we're going to sit here and kind of process the idea of a marathon debate schedule, but we're also going to take a break. And when we get back, President Trump and how much he's spending for his reelection bid. Now that ISIS has lost all its territory, what happens to the people ISIS left behind? She chose to take herself out there. She should stay in Syria and rot.

And what about their children? How It Ends, a new series on Embedded. And we're back. Let's turn to Trump, who's always been raising and spending a lot of money. That's kind of one of his major hallmarks here. And first on the raising side, how is he comparing to Democrats right now? He's blowing them out of the water. I mean, the fact is he's raised total $67.5 million through the end of 2018.

Right. So these are his last year numbers, not his first quarter numbers. It doesn't line up exactly. Exactly. It doesn't line up exactly. At some point when Democrats coalesce and get around one person, they'll most likely be able to raise the kind of money to match what President Trump is raising. But so far, that's why a reelection bid does have some advantages because structurally, he started running for reelection the day after he won election and is able to continue to kind of pile on that. He's the first president who started raising money for his reelection in the first two years. So he started earlier than anyone else. Just to give you an example about how incumbent presidents have so many advantages, structural resources, et cetera, he's spending $5 million on social media, more than all the Democrats combined.

And the point is he is able, because he doesn't have a contested primary, to develop this powerful infrastructure and really a mighty campaign. And that's something that incumbents have that no challenger ever will. One thing I think we have to explain about how the structure is sort of set up with reelects is there's a Trump campaign, and then there are these PACs that support him that are affiliated with the campaign that then also do joint fundraising with the National Party Committee, with the Republican National Committee. Right. And President Trump has two of those supporting him right now. So the Trump campaign itself proper has raised sixty seven and a half

million dollars through the end of 2018. It's spent about $56 million. When it comes to these other two packs, you've got Trump Victory and Trump Make America Great Again. That's what their official names are. People can give up to $5,000 per donation to those packs. That's more than you can give to a campaign. And together, Trump Victory and Trump Make America great again have raised $100 million just through the end of 2018. Some of that money will be shared and used with the RNC, but all of it is for the benefit of Trump winning reelection in 2020. Okay, so we talked about him raising $67.5 million last year, but that spending number, $56 million, is huge. That's a huge share of what he raised. Mara, what is he spending all of this money on? Well, he's spending it on a lot of different things. He's hiring staff.

He's paying for those rallies that he holds. He held 18 rallies in 20 days before the 2018 midterm elections campaigning for Republican Senate candidates around the country. Yeah, and we've both been to these rallies. They are not small productions. Yeah, they're big productions. And look, you know, people talk about the burn rate. Obviously, you don't want to campaign to squander their money. But if they're just sitting on it, that's bad, too. Right. You want to spend it. You're looking for votes. I mean, yeah, it's there for volunteers. Yeah. And one of the other things that they spent money on,

six million dollars in legal bills, legal bills when it comes to the defense attorneys in cases dealing with Trump's alleged affair with Stormy Daniels, the adult film actress, Donald Trump Jr.'s meeting with Russians at Trump Tower, and other allegations involving his son-in-law, Jared Kushner. So that money is part of that because of the allegations of campaign finance violations. Yeah. And I think that's something that people need to be really aware of here is because you think of the president's legal troubles as kind of being varied and many. So it's not just the stuff that he is going through with, say, the Southern District of New York or even what's happening with the Mueller report. There are these campaign

related legal issues that are eating up a lot of money that isn't coming out of the president's pocket. Right. Right. And just one bottom line on this. Last time, 2016, Donald Trump ran a bare-bones, relatively inexpensive campaign. As a matter of fact, he really did it on the cheap. He even, in some areas, made money because, of course, he used his own venues. He rented them to the campaign. This time, that will not be the case. He is going to be a terrifically well-funded campaign with basically as much money as we've ever seen an incumbent raise in history. So this really sounds a lot to me like the president has a lot of built-in advantages. Absolutely.

That's why only two presidents in recent memory have lost re-election, Carter and George H.W. Bush. Incumbents historically get re-elect, barring an unpopular war, a recession or a hostage crisis. But let's be clear here. The president also doesn't have the same kind of personal rules for the kind of money he's going to accept that Democrats have. We don't know if that's going to be true of the eventual Democrat nominee. But as we stand right now, they have some pretty strict rules about what some of these candidates are willing to accept. Right. Democrats are really saying that they don't want any corporate money. They don't want bundlers.

They're really sort of bad talking money. And what a lot of strategists who have raised a lot of money worry about is they'll say, why do Democrats want to fight with one hand tied behind their back when President Trump is not only fighting with both hands, but brass knuckles and whatever other tool is at his disposal because he's willing to take it all. Right. Would you rather be pure or would you rather win? So we have a bare knuckles brawl for money going on here and it's not over. We're going to hear a lot more of that over the next couple of weeks and we will be back as soon as there is new news you need to know. Until then, head to npr.org slash politics newsletter to subscribe to a roundup of our best online stories and analysis. I'm Kelsey Snell. I cover Congress. I'm Domenico Montanaro, political editor. And I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent.

And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.