| Matt Yglesias makes an important point about the nature of Obama's small donor fundraising: What if the small donors who powered Obama's rise look at a guy who's ahead in the polls and who everyone is predicting will shatter financial records and think to themselves, "why bother." Small dollar fundraising requires you to overcome collective action problems and too much success may make that difficult. The psychology of donation seems to me to require both "buy-in" on the part of the donor and also a sense of being embattled. This is the right kind of question to be asking, though it's not just a question of too much success. Obviously Obama's strongest, record-breaking months were after his victory in Iowa, when he started to look more and more like the nominee --- though both Obama and Clinton saw strong one-day totals right after a decisive loss. But Yglesias is point at the dynamism of Obama's fundraising model. We saw this relative to Hillary Clinton in the primaries. While Obama's online fundraising was capable of sudden and staggering leaps and bounds, Clinton's traditional, large-donor fundraising was much more reliable, even stunningly consistent, particularly over the slow summer months, in turning in the same amount month after month.
In other words, Obama's online fundraising follows the same general rules of YouTube traffic or Facebook friend requests --- it follows spurts, is much more subject to group psychology, and is more difficult to corral into steady, consistent progress. |
