Bernie Sanders Becomes First Candidate to Reach 1 Million Individual Donors

By Holly Otterbein, Politico

20 September 19

ne million people have donated to Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign, his campaign said Thursday.

He is the first candidate to announce reaching that milestone.

"Our strength is in numbers, and that is why Bernie Sanders is the only candidate who is able to say his campaign will rely only on grassroots funding in both the primary and against Donald Trump," Sanders' campaign manager, Faiz Shakir, said in a statement. "Like all campaigns we are beholden to our donors, and we’re proud to stand with 1 million working people."

Sanders' team said more than 99 percent of his donors can contribute again because they have not yet given the maximum allowable donation. The campaign also said that 125,000-plus people are giving recurring monthly contributions to Sanders.

Though he did not mention Elizabeth Warren by name, Shakir's statement could be interpreted as an effort to contrast the Vermont senator with his primary rival from Massachusetts, who has sworn off big-money fundraisers in the primary but said she would do what is necessary to compete with Trump in a general election. Sanders' team said he would not do high-dollar fundraisers at any point.

Warren has announced in June that she received 1 million donations, but not 1 million individual donors.

According to Sanders' aides, the top employer of his donors are Starbucks, Walmart and Amazon, and the most common profession is teachers. In counties that voted for President Donald Trump after supporting Barack Obama, the biggest employers are Walmart, the U.S. Postal Service and Target, the Sanders campaign said.

In 2008, Obama reached the 1-million mark in late February. In his first campaign for the White House, Sanders' campaign said he received donations from 1 million people by early January.