27 yuuuge Bernie Q4 fundraising numbers

1. At least $3,200 of the $34.5 million haul came from sex work — which, if you oppose, stop reading now. It’s work. That image features 26 donations, at between $20 and $250. The total showing in that picture is $1,497.70, for an average of $57.60 (roughly three times our campaign’s average donation). Oh, and this is not the only person whose sex work led to more donations to the campaign last year.
2. 0 is the number of wine caves in which Bernie dined with max donors — or anyone else. (Sadly, we don’t know how well this website helped raise money.)
3. 99.9 percent can give more. That’s 1,298,700 of his nearly 1.3 million, meaning that he has about 1,300 max donors. Those max donors have given him $3.64 million of his $96 million.
4. 465,461 donations came from people who hadn’t given before October. (The most recent BERN NOTICE states that “[f]irst-time donors accounted for 25% of Bernie’s donations throughout the quarter.”)
5. Nearly 300,000 Q4 donors were giving for the first time. At $18.53 per, they gave $5,559,000 — almost $2 million more than his max donors. And damn near all of them can give again.
6. Our Q4 was yuuugely better than our Q3. In Q3, we averaged 634 donations per hour, for about 1,400,111 donations ($25.3 million, $18.07 average). But our Q4 donation-per-hour average was 852 — up about 33 percent — from about 1,861,846 donations.
7. We raised about $16.5 million in October and November — $34.5 million minus $18 million.
8. December was magical, y’all. At $18 million, Bernie’s December haul was bigger than Andrew Yang’s entire Q4 haul ($16.5 million) — which is not to dismiss YangGang. The #MATH guy started his campaign with a clear disadvantage, since his first name is not Bernie; he hasn’t been fighting for quality, affordable health care since Andrew Yang was in grade school; and nobody’s calling him the amendment king.
9. Speaking of Yang and his campaign pledge to give people $1,000 a month, or 1K, our donation average per hour during the final 38 hours of the quarter was more than 8K: 8,077.
10. Here’s the math on that: Bernie emailed saying we were about 135,000 shy of 5 million, which means we were at roughly 4,865,000. We started the quarter at 3,310,111 ( 910,000 from Q1 plus 1,000,000 from Q2 plus 1,400,111 from Q3), so we’d already gotten 1,554,889 in the quarter.
11. Divide $34,500,000 by the $18.53 average and you get 1,861,846 donations. 1,861,846–1,554,889=306,956 donations between 10 a.m. EST Dec. 30 and the second the year ended. 306,956/38=8,077.
12. During those 38 hours, our campaign was receiving $149,681 per hour.
13. The 306,956 donations we got in that 38-hour period are almost 82,000 more than the roughly 225,000 we got in the 24-hour period after he announced.
14. At $18.53 per donation, those 306,956 donations added almost $5.7 million to our haul.
15. So roughly 16 percent — one in six dollars — of the $34.5 million we raised over ninety-two days came in a little more than a day and a half.
16. When the math of that fundraising crunch started coming in, I thought we were doing amazingly well. In Q2, our donations-per-hour was at a mere 458, but between 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. Dec. 30, we went from being 135,000 shy to being 126,209 shy, for a rate of 2,806 per hour.
17. Then we went yuuugely past amazingly and started truly Berning. Four hours later, at 5 p.m., came word that we were only 102,216 shy of 5 million — a rate of 5,998 per hour.
18. For the whole quarter, our average donations per hour was 843 — almost double Q2’s 458 and up quite a bit from even Q1’s 714, which benefited from having less time to lower the 24-hour influx’s numerical boost.
19. Not only is 1,861,846 more than 300,000 donations higher than Q3, it’s 56 percent of our total donations from before Q4. We had a little more than 3.3 million donations. We added more than 50 percent to that total.
20. One in eleven donations we received between Feb. 19 and Jan. 1 came between 10 a.m. Dec. 30 and Jan. 1.
21. In Q4 2007, with the most reviled president in decades ineligible to run again and his detested vice president bowing out after eight years of fouling the world, neither Hillary nor Obama raised $34.5 million. Hillary and Obama combined to raise $35.7 million for the primary season. So we’re $1.2 million shy of their combined mark.
22. People in all 50 states donated to the campaign in the last 38 hours of the quarter.
23. On Dec. 31, 2015, Bernie emailed to say that almost 1 million people had donated to the (previous) campaign. We’re now roughly 300,000 donors past that mark.
24. On Dec. 31, 2019, 40,000 people donated for the first time, for an average of 1,667 new people per hour and a total raised (at $18.53 per) of $741,000.
25. Bernie’s $34.5 million Q4 haul is more than 36 percent higher than his Q3 haul and almost 36 percent of the campaign’s total first-year fundraising.
26. Convert every dollar raised to an inch and, at 544 miles, he could drive the 513 miles from Burlington, Vt., to Washington, D.C. — and the White House — with 31.5 to spare.
27. The speech: Convert every dollar into one second and you get 9,593 hours — enough to deliver extended and significant remarks on taxes more than one thousand times.

Bonus: Roughly 1,298,700 donors can give more, and they’ve given him $92.36 million, for an average of $71 each (almost four $18.53 donations, or almost three of what my friend Cullen calls a “Bernie $27”).

If all of them max out, we’ll be sitting on $3,544,000,000.

And if they do it in increments of $18.53 and nobody else gives him a nickel, that’ll be 191,257,420 donations.

That would be yuuuge.