Thread by @jeremy_m_joseph

As long as presidential campaigns use first day fundraising numbers as indicators of strength, it's important to take a close look at their released figures. FEC reports shine a light on this data eventually, but until then, campaigns very carefully release selective facts.

Our latest obscured numbers come from the #biden2020 campaign. In the escalating arms race of first day fundraising, the campaign proudly touted their $6.3M haul. Their number of individual donors, however, falls well short of other candidates'.

If we value the support of individuals over a few big money donors, then a more complete look at these figures should look something like this.
Note: The total area represents the amount raised. The taller the candidate's block, the more grassroots support they have.

One strong indicator of grassroots support is having a low average donation. The Biden campaign deftly sidestepped this weakness in their narrative by only announcing the average for ONLINE donors ($41). Given their 96,926 individual donors, the ACTUAL average is $65.

This was clearly a way to exclude their big $ donors from their released figures, but it hasn't stopped news outlets from repeating this meaningless online avg. So what can we deduce about these high dollar "offline" donations?

Given our incomplete data, we have 2 possibilities, one more plausible than the other:
A) Nearly half of their first day total came from a few big $ donors
OR
B) Offline donation avg was "small" (<$200) but was excluded from released info despite counting for most of the total?

Clearly, I'm inclined to accept the first conclusion:
The Biden campaign is trying to obscure that a minority (1% - 15%) of their donors contributed a significant chunk ($2.4M - $3M) of their day 1 funds.

#2020election