Opinion by: Saagar Enjeti
One of the themes in this show is that money matters a lot, in determining political outcomes, in determining life outcomes…
But when it comes to political campaigns it matters not just how much money you have but where that money is coming from.
We spend a lot of time here talking about the Democratic candidates but one of the things that are often overlooked is who they’re going to face in the general election, Donald Trump.
The Republican National Committee put out its numbers. For the money of September yesterday raising 27.3 million dollars. That comes on the heels of the Trump campaign’s announcement that it raised 125 million dollars in the third quarter and has nearly 158 million dollars in cash on hand. To put that in perspective that is 6 times what Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren raised in the same period and 10 times that raised by Joe Biden.
It would be easy to dismiss Trump’s campaign coffers as that cobbled together by Wall Street but the data tells a very different story. The average donation to the Trump campaign is 44 dollars, mirroring almost exactly the average donation number of Elizabeth Warren. Furthermore, 98.17 percent of those donations, 200 dollars or less. This is fundamentally a grassroots level of fundraising whatever many of you may think about the policies.
This something that so many in the current Democratic field just can’t hope whatsoever to match.
Act-Blue, the main client to donate to Democratic candidates put out some very interesting data about the occupations of its primary donors. We discussed this on the show yesterday, but fundraising data is perhaps one of the most important things that we can get our hands-on. Think about how much you have to believe in somebody to whip out your wallet and actually donate to a candidate.
This recently revealed data shows pretty starkly the political coalitions that each candidate is appealing too. Current leading candidates like Pete Buttigieg and Elizabeth Warren are not going to capture the White House with numbers like this.
Take a look at Elizabeth Warren, the number one category that she is leading here in is librarians, college professors, lawyers, and economists. Where does Pete Buttigieg compete? Well, chief executives, clergy, lawyers, physicians, and economists. Donald Trump won the white house on the backs of forgotten Americans who hadn’t donated to a campaign or believed in our government in a very long.
Those people outnumber the professional class that is obsessed with Warren and Buttigieg. If you watch cable news and read the New York Times you might be deluded into thinking that the college-educated elite are the people who decide our fate. Don’t forget that only 27% of the country actually holds a four-year degree from a college institution.
If you look at the Democratic data I previewed earlier you can see that pretty much only Bernie Sanders and Andrew yang appeal to normal Americans, from forklift operators to truck drivers and cashiers. These are the people MSNBC reporters pass on their way to work or order a coffee from, but they far outnumber the people who rule the commanding heights of American culture.
Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, and Andrew Yang all have a lot in common. Their message is fundamentally the same, that the political elite in Washington crafted decades of American policy to deliberately screw over American workers in favor of the corporate elite and china. This was bolstered by the media, the think tank class here in dc, and was all done by taking the votes of the working class and then working against them the moment they came to Washington.
Notice too that Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, and Andrew Yang do not talk about. Elizabeth Warren talks a lot about economic inequality but she also is obsessed with impeaching Donald Trump, decriminalizing border crossings, puts gender pronouns in her twitter bio, and is basically a social justice warrior incarnate. Buttigieg, Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, and so many others run far to the cultural left of the American electorate while basically running to their economic right.
The Democratic party seems pretty intent from what I can see in going in the latter direction. They want to protect their pals on Wall Street and deny the voices of those on main street. I guess I shouldn’t be too upset about it because it seems certain to deliver them another loss in 2020.
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