Something that got my brain running was the following:
Barack Obama (Senator, Illinois) - Obama is out in front on the number of contributors. He has a great deal of smaller contributions, but many of these people gave several times. If these are aggregated, no contributor gave less than $225. A couple of contributors gave odd amounts, but did so several times.
When the national fund-raising amounts came out earlier this month, a great deal was made about the large number of individual contributors Obama's campaign had, and also the number of "small" contributions which were received. In particular, I recall the following from Daily Kos:
A world in which $4,600 contributions dominate the political scene is terrible, but one in which $20-50-100 contributions can fuel a top-tier campaign is fantastic. Not only are such contributions a sign of energy and deep political engagement, but each one of those donors is now vested in their chosen campaigns and will work hard to make sure that investment pays off. We now see that even Clinton's Big Money donors can be countered with an army (100K strong and growing) of small dollar funders. Heck, even Edwards is creeping up on the Clinton machine in terms of number of donors. That has real significance.
Now, $225 is by no means a huge figure, but it's not really a "small" figure either (in general, I typically see "small" defined as $100 or less, as in the above quote). I saw a screen shot (midway down page) of the Obama campaign website after the quarter ended, which gave a total of 108,095 actual donations from 83,531 contributors. That's 24,564 duplicate donations (donations from individuals who had previously contributed), or 22.7% of all donations received.
The dirty, cynical part of me is wondering how many of those "small" contributions, if aggregated, actually turn out to be fairly significant sums and if, perhaps, there is some "gaming" of the system occurring.
