Bernie Sanders raises $4m in 12 hours after announcing 2020 campaign
Bernie Sanders raised $4m from 150,000 donors in all 50 states in the 12 hours after announcing he had entered the 2020 race for the White House on Tuesday, according to his campaign.
The fundraising haul was more than double the $1.5m that Senator Kamala Harris raised in the first 24 hours of her campaign. The California Democrat had been the biggest first-day fundraiser in the race so far, theguardian.com reported.
Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar’s campaign said the Democrat raised more than $1m in the 48 hours after launching her presidential bid this month.
Sanders, the independent senator from Vermont, whose 2016 presidential campaign helped energize the progressive movement and reshaped the Democratic Party, released an email early on Tuesday morning saying he would run again in 2020.
Sanders’ campaign announced that evening that in the first 12 hours after his launch, the senator raised a stunning $4m from 150,000 donors in all 50 states. The average donation was $27 – the same small dollar amount he often touted as a sign of his grassroots revolution in 2016.
His launch video was viewed nearly 6m times while he received 330,000 “pledges of support”, roughly a third of his goal to reach one million to build an “unprecedented and historic grassroots campaign”.
Sanders, a self-styled Democratic socialist who spent much of his nearly 30-year congressional career on the political fringe, cast his candidacy as the best way to accomplish the mission he started four years ago when he ran against Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination.
“Together, you and I and our 2016 campaign began the political revolution,” he said in an email announcing his decision to supporters on Tuesday morning. “Now, it is time to complete that revolution and implement the vision that we fought for.”
Sanders, 77, running as a Democrat again, believes he can prevail in a crowded and diverse field that includes several female and minority candidates, and then beat Donald Trump, whom he called on Tuesday “the most dangerous president in modern American history”.
Asked in an interview on CBS on Tuesday morning what would be different about his 2020 campaign, Sanders replied: “We’re gonna win.”
However, whether he can once again capture grassroots support, and whether the energy of his past campaign will pass to other candidates, will likely be a central factor in determining who Democrats nominate to take on the sitting president at the next election.
The progressive policies Sanders helped popularize in 2016 – Medicare for All, a $15 an hour federal minimum wage, tuitionfree college, demands to fight climate change more aggressively and to tax the wealthy at a higher rate – have now been broadly embraced by several other presidential candidates.
A series of early Sanders hires for top roles are intended to illustrate his campaign’s commitment to demographic and geographic diversity.
Faiz Shakir, the political director of the American Civil Liberties Union, will serve as campaign manager. The 39-year-old former aide to Harry Reid will be the first Muslim to manage a presidential campaign. The campaign also hired the progressive organizer Analilia Mejia to be the political director and the activist Sarah Badawi to be her deputy.