Can $3 make an impact on determining the future President of the United States? According to Mitt Romney, it can!
“Donate $3 today to be automatically entered to be Mitt’s special guest for Election
Night on Super Tuesday,” reads an email appeal from the Romney campaign
to supporters. A video was also put on the web petitioning donors to
give $20 to battle the “Obama Attack Machine.” With the power of the
Super PAC’s and Romney’s own personal bank account rivaling that of a
small nation, why would these miniscule gifts tip the scales in Romney’s
favor?
Reporters Matea Gold and Melanie Mason from the Chicago Tribune
wrote that, “Although he has outstripped his Republican rivals in
fundraising, he also is burning through cash. Romney spent money nearly
three times faster than he raised it in January, leaving him with $7.7
million. Since then, his campaign has shelled out at least $2.7 million
for television advertising alone, according to sources familiar with the
ad buys.”
Furthermore, Romney’s donor numbers are
vastly different than his political rivals. Just 9 percent of the nearly
$63 million Romney raised through the end of January came from
supporters who gave $200 or less. The Campaign Finance Institute found
that two-thirds of the money he has raised so far has come from donors
who have given $2,500. However, Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, as well as
President Barack Obama, have had about half of their funding come in
from small donors.
Online political fundraising
is definitely proving to be the favored choice for candidates to reach
the masses. “Romney’s campaign is trying to reverse that imbalance by
soliciting single-digit donations via the Web.
That’s a tactic regularly
used by the Obama campaign to gather new email addresses for future
fundraising,” reports Gold and Mason.
So which is more important: investing more
time into smaller donations to gain voter support or investing less time
into major donors to garner more money? With democracy, I would have to
say it’s both.
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