Warren, Sanders make last-minute plea to voters for donations: 'We fell short'
Warren called on her supporters to meet her biggest fundraising goal to date
Both Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders made last-minute pleas to voters for cash this week, less than one week before the Iowa caucuses kickstart the Democratic presidential nominating process.
“We have some bad news,” Warren’s campaign wrote in an email to supporters late Tuesday night. “We fell short of our daily goal yesterday, which means we're already pacing behind to meet our goal of $3.5 million by the FEC deadline on Friday.”
That goal for the last five days of the month averages out to $700,000 per day, Warren’s biggest fundraising goal to date. (By comparison, Pete Buttigieg’s campaign asked voters to chip in $1 million, about $200,000 per day).
“January 2020 has been the best fundraising start to any month of our campaign so far,” Warren’s chief strategist, Joe Rospars, wrote on Twitter earlier this month.
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Candidates are obligated to disclose their spending and cash-on-hand amounts by Jan. 31, the Federal Election Committee’s year-end deadline — just three days before the Iowa caucuses.
“We want to report a number that makes it clear WE are the grassroots campaign that can beat Trump,” Sanders’ campaign manager Faiz Shakir wrote in a Monday email to supporters. “And in order to do that we are aiming for as many possible donations as we can get between now and this deadline. But as of right now, we are a bit short of the kind of number we are hoping to post when this deadline ends.”
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During the last three months of 2019, Warren’s campaign announced that it raised $21.2 million, substantially less than Sanders’ astonishing $34.5 million haul. It also marked a drop from the previous quarter, when she brought in $24.6 million, the second-highest amount in the 2020 Democratic primary.
Warren, who like Sanders rejects traditional big-money fundraisers, also raised slightly less in the last three months of 2019 than moderates Buttigieg ($24.7 million) and former Vice President Joe Biden ($22.7 million), both of whom accepted big-dollar donations.
Biden, Buttigieg, Sanders and Warren did not report their cash-on-hand amounts.
The RealClearPolitics voting averages show Warren in third place nationally and in Iowa, trailing Sanders and Biden.
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