Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign said it raised $34.5 million during the final financial quarter of 2019, the highest reported yet of a 2020 Democrat in the race so far.
“Bernie Sanders is closing the year with the most donations of any candidate in history at this point in a presidential campaign,” Sanders’s campaign manager Faiz Shakir said in an email Thursday. “He is proving each and every day that working class Americans are ready and willing to fully fund a campaign that stands up for them and takes on the biggest corporations and the wealthy. You build a grassroots movement to beat Donald Trump and create a political revolution one $18 donation at a time, and that’s exactly why Bernie is going to win.”
The Vermont senator’s team said he received more than 1.8 million donations from supporters between Oct. 1 and Dec. 31, 2019, including 40,000 new donors on New Year’s Eve. The fundraising spree began just before Sanders suffered a heart attack, which kept him sidelined at a Las Vegas hospital for more than a week before the mid-October Democratic debate.
[Read more: Doctors’ letters tout Bernie Sanders’s health, three months after heart attack]
However, the Sanders campaign didn’t reveal how much cash-on-hand it still had going into the new year, a key benchmark of a candidate’s strength and ability to endure a drawn-out primary process. The cash-on-hand figure will have to be revealed by the campaign’s Jan. 15 filing with the Federal Election Commission.
The $34.5 million haul by Sanders, 78, brings his 2019 total to $96 million. That’s based on over 5 million individual donations, for an average contribution of $18. It doesn’t including $12.7 million he’d transferred from other federal fundraising accounts, accumulated during his 16 years in the House and 13 in the Senate when he rarely faced a tough race in Vermont and could stockpile campaign cash.
Sanders aides said more than 99.9% of his donors were legally allowed to give again because they had not reached the $2,800 maximum or other spending limits. That could help sustain him through the rest of the primary process, which, with 15 candidates still in the race, could be protracted.
Pete Buttigieg, 37, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, announced on Jan. 1 that his White House bid had received $24.7 million during the fourth quarter for a total of $76 million. Andrew Yang, an entrepreneur and nonprofit organization executive, has also disclosed bringing in $16.5 million over the same time period.
Elizabeth Warren’s team spent the closing days of last year managing expectations regarding her fundraising efforts. The Massachusetts senator told supporters in an email that she’d raised about $17 million, 30% down compared to her third-quarter haul of almost $25 million. That total put her behind Sanders’s $25.3 million, but ahead of Buttigieg’s $19.1 million and former Vice President Joe Biden’s $15.3 million.
