Okay, so the inevitable fundraising post: Holy Christ, Barack Obama raised over $30 million with over 250,000 contributors.
As Steve Benen points out, "Hillary Clinton got a fairly significant head start on 2007 fundraising by transferring $10 million from her Senate campaign account -- and Obama still surpassed her." Mark Ambinder argues quite persuasively that Obama's haul "imposes an obligaton on all of us who cover the race: we need to figure out why the "national" frontrunner, Hillary Clinton, isn't generating as much excitement as her chief competitor." This quote, for good reason, keeps popping up all over the progressive blogosphere.
But Matthew Yglesias has a decent counter-argument:
To me this isn't all that puzzling. Obama's supporters, though numerically fewer than Clinton's, are more drawn from the "high information" segment of the electorate that has both more money to donate and more inclination to do so. Donations would be a great proxy for intensity of support of you were looking at two demographically similar groups of people, but that's not the case here.
Unlike Ambinder's reasoning, I haven't seen this one picked up on too much. Frankly I'm not sure whether to agree or disagree, but it's a good thing to keep in mind while simultaneously salivating over Obama's nonetheless insanely impressive second quarter numbers.
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