Not so revolutionary
I like many others were quite amazed at the number of small donors that Obama was able to fund raise from. However, that turns out not to be true. Obama had the same number of small donors as President Bush. He had 26% to Bush’s 25%.
It comes down to which definition of “small donor” you accept:
Someone who donated to the Obama campaign by scraping together $199, period.
Or someone who donated $199 to the Obama campaign several times, perhaps totaling close to the $4,600 legal limit for the primary and general elections. In aggregate, that would vault him/her out of the small donor category that was so useful to the political campaign’s public relations campaign portraying the donor base as about two times as broad as it really was.
The reported numbers show that Obama actually received 80% more money from large donors (those giving $1,000 or more total) than from small donors.