It’s coming down to the wire, folks. We need to help Bernie reach his goal of 1,000,000 contributions. Here’s why:
The most remarkable feature of the 2016 election was the Bernie Sanders campaign, which broke the pattern set by over a century of US political history. A substantial body of political science research convincingly establishes that elections are pretty much bought; campaign funding alone is a remarkably good predictor of electability, for Congress as well as for the presidency. It also predicts the decisions of elected officials. Correspondingly, a considerable majority of the electorate—those lower on the income scale—are effectively disenfranchised, in that their representatives disregard their preferences.
-Noam Chomsky, October, 2017 interview with The Nation
As you have probably heard, Bernie has set an unprecedented goal of 1,000,000 contributions before the quarterly FEC filing deadline at midnight. When he set this goal, it was about a week before the deadline and he had “only” garnered 700,000 contributions. Now we’re at the final day and, last I checked, the total has jumped to 877,028. It’s still a ways off, but it’s possible. This morning we were at around 820,000.
In 2016 it took Bernie 6 months of unprecedented grassroots, PAC and corporate lobbyist and bundler-free fundraising to reach 1,000,000 contributions. In 2019 he’s on the verge of doing it in 6 weeks. This is already an astounding amount, but 1,000,000 would be one for the history books.
So if you’re feeling the Bern, please, now’s the time to give, any amount at all. Since the goal is for contributions, any size contribution whatsoever will equally help push us toward the goal.