One reason I'm more cynical than I used to be is that in the early aughts and later, "we" showed that small donor fundraising was a viable path for people. More than that, given that contribution limits are about the only thing left in our campaign finance laws, there is actually a limit to how well you can do by mostly relying on big donors. The surprising lack of interest in this - not lack of interest in the small donor money, but the lack of using it to be freed from constraints created by focusing in big donors - was depressing.
Anyway, it's more true now than ever. There's a fundraising model, perhaps even an easier one, that doesn't require the whales to keep maxing out.
South Carolina Senate candidate Jaime Harrison's campaign announced Sunday it raised $57 million in the third quarter of 2020, shattering the quarterly fundraising record for a Senate race set by Beto O'Rourke in 2018 by almost $20 million.
