According to my initial projections off this crowdsourced spreadsheet of Obama donations I set up after the Wisconsin victory, Obama has already raised at least $45 million for February and is on track to raise $60 million for the month.
A source who tracks Obama’s public donation number like a hawk tells me that Obama had tallied about 256,000 donors for the year as of the end of January. Those donors produced $36 million in receipts, for an average contribution of $140.
Obama’s public donor count stands at 583,525, meaning about 327,000 people donated in February. With the same average, that would give Obama just over $46 million in 21 days.
This is in line with the expectations game they are playing. The campaign says they will raise at least $36 million in February. You can bet that they wouldn’t say that if they hadn’t already passed the mark, plus a decent sized buffer. Their lowered expectations call for them to beat January’s total, when they will in fact blow them out.
A couple of notes.
First, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the $140 average go up this month. People give more as the stakes go up. I’m sure he is also getting some “frontrunner” money he wasn’t getting before. I wouldn’t be surprised if the total would up being $70 million.
Also, thanks to an interesting quirk in the way the Obama website publicly records donations — batch uploading donations from made from the email fundraising link at once — it’s possible to separate out donations made from email from those that organically come in on the Web site. Both e-mails I tracked seemed to generate about 36,000 contributions, or somewhere between $3.5 and $4 million. So, even without any momentum-generating primary victories (in fact, there are none left this month), all the Obama campaign would need to do is send 3 or 4 more emails to their list to reach $60 million.
Adjust your March 1 David Plouffe conference call expectations accordingly.