Very interesting…
It’s now on: the marathon-length sprint to the second stage finish line (Primaries). Candidates have weighed their options on “Can I? Should I?”, staffing, strategy, media coverage (earned and unearned/paid), travel teams, destinations & events, and their policies. And in the early States, endorsers and volunteers.
And EVERYTHING is turned into a race – the aforementioned endorsers and volunteers but also money. I can’t tell you how often I’m pitched for the “end of week | month | quarter” so-called “deadlines” by which my paltry amount would make or break the campaign. It’s DIRE time and I’m the magic key that unlocks the “win vault”. It’s all nonsense but staffers and candidates boast about their total hauls – and this number:
It’s one measure (of course, it can be gamed to a certain degree but that’s another post about how it’s counted) for grassroots engagement – while no candidate will turn away large donations (for the most part – some donors may be “toxic” for one reason or another for a given candidate) and large makes it “easy money” to spend, touting your small donor numbers is an expression of that support. As Sundance puts it “Main Street vs Wall Street”.
I’m not surprised about Donald Trump’s numbers. If he really wanted to, I’d bet he could do a lot of self-financing. That said, his entire career was built on using other people’s money. And you have to admit, a lot of ordinary people still adore him because his policies, when you really look at them, benefited them in the aggregate.
However, #2 is rather surprising. I picked Vivek Ramaswamy as my dark horse for this presidential cycle. Sundance all but ignores that data point and only concentrates on Trump vs DeSantis. I’m not understanding why but I’m beginning to wonder if we may be seeing a repeat of the 1978 campaign when a relatively unknown (at the national level) peanut farmer (yes, a former Georgia Governor starting 1970) beat a bunch of much better-known contenders.
Is Vivek the political reincarnation of Jimmah at least in this respect (CERTAINLY a conservative version of Progressive (for that era) Carter? He’s working his butt off, earning lots of media interviews, seemingly everywhere all the time, and doing the social media play much better than his rivals. He’s Wicked Smaht, driven, hitting all the right points (for me, anyway), eloquent, and there’s a lot of buzz that he’s created for himself around the blogosphere.
No, no one’s perfect and I have some issues that I’m wrestling with (lack of a voting record against which to evaluate, going for the Brass Ring right off the bat (although, see driven, above)). But who else is capturing all the attention in a way that ISN’T Trump-style?
No one. And that number above should be seen as a powerful signal.
(H/T: Conservative Treehouse)
