[S]en. Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign pulled in $26.2 million during the third quarter of this year, keeping pace with his main rival, Hilary Clinton.
“What is clear now is that this campaign to transform America will have the resources to fight all the way to the convention,” Jeff Weaver, Sanders’ campaign manager, said in a statement Friday.
The campaign has spent about $11.3 million, according to the report, filed Thursday with the Federal Election Commission. FEC records show the campaign has raised about $41 million since Sanders announced his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination.
The campaign highlighted that the contributions were small. The average donation was about $30, and only 270 of Sanders’ 650,000 donors gave the maximum contribution amount allowed, $2,700, according to spokesman Michael Briggs.
“This campaign is being fueled at the grassroots by small contributions from working people and middle income people, we will continue to communicate with those people and we will continue to fundraise those people,” Weaver said in a media scrum following the Democratic debate Tuesday. “This campaign belongs to them, they paid for it.”
Hillary Clinton, Sanders’ main primary challenger, brought in only a few million more, reporting $33 million on hand, according to FEC filings.
Not counted in these numbers, one of the most successful fundraising periods for Sanders came after the debate in Las Vegas on Tuesday, when the campaign received 97,800 contributions totaling $3.2 million.
While the Sanders campaign has a solid organizing infrastructure in New Hampshire and Iowa, the first primary states, the campaign is now setting up staffers in Nevada and South Carolina.
It will be an uphill battle for Sanders to compete in more racially diverse states, and while the Vermont senator has put seven staffers in Nevada over the last week, the Clinton team has had operatives in the state for weeks, according to the Clinton and Sanders camps.
“The Sanders team has a state director here in Nevada who landed last week and they are looking for office space,” Roberta Lange, chair of Democratic Party of Nevada, told VTDigger in Vegas on Tuesday. “I think you will see a pretty big operation from him statewide.”
