Obama and his team have been very smart in cultivating small donors.  They really matter!

Of the $33 million Mr. Obama raised in the second quarter, about a third consisted of donations of less than $200 — more than the $10 million raised in $2,300 checks from big donors. Mrs. Clinton, in contrast, raised $2.3 million in donations of less than $200. She brought in $12.3 million — out of $21.5 million in the quarter — in $2,300 checks, from donors prohibited from giving again to her primary campaign. Both candidates now have about the same amount of cash to spend on the primary.

Mr. Obama’s roster of 258,000 donors has exceeded the national mailing list that Mrs. Clinton accumulated through her two Senate races and Bill Clinton’s two runs for the White House. None of the other primary candidates in either party has claimed more than 100,000 individual donors.

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Obama’s Camp Sees Big Value in Small Donors

Published: July 17, 2007

www.nytimes.com/2007/07/17/us/politics/17obama.html

 

WASHINGTON, July 16 — Senator Barack Obama was the guest of honor at a dinner at the luxurious Mark Hopkins Hotel in San Francisco this spring with a few hundred lawyers, executives and investors. The guests drank a boutique beer with Mr. Obama’s face on the label and contributed more than $1 million in $2,300 checks to support his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Just moments before he arrived, Mr. Obama had said goodbye to a less exclusive crowd of 10,000 that had gathered to hear him speak across the bay in Oakland. They paid nothing to hear him, but spent $40,000 on Obama T-shirts, baseball caps, buttons and other knickknacks. And the Obama campaign registered each of the purchasers as one of the record 258,000 contributors it signed up in the first six months of the year.

Since he got into the race, Mr. Obama has hopscotched from big-ticket to big-crowd events across the country, trying to turn the early excitement about his candidacy into campaign cash and a national political organization.