[Disclaimer, I did not read the document Jason cites]

  However, is there a difference between 'donor' & 'donation' and 'how many of 'em'? Is a single donor who writes four checks for $50 the same as a single $200 donor-donation?  See, we may wish to view this in terms of a retail business where the amount of average purchase, total traffic and repeat customers are factored as well as total sales or gross revenue. Obama's 'donations' continued month after month and half a million people was impressive, then it doubled and we're numb to 1.5 million donors?  Forget percentages or 'how small' each check was...Obama racked up digits and hasn't stopped.

  That matters. Bush or Kerry hit a ceiling with small donors and a base of over a million of any size donor seems to at least credit Obama with creating a market for funding and exploiting it beyond any assumptions.

  Face it, a candidate could have 90% of his donors writing small checks and if he only had a handful we wouldn't be reading about it. Give me a million ad a half people writing checks of any size (end of story).

  A good percentage of small donors is impressive.  I'm more impressed by how many total donors Obama has....

Democrats had better hope that these small donors continue to pony up the dough in 2012, 2016, 2020, and so on.

Otherwise, absent a real public financing system, Obama's decision to opt out of the spending restraints is going to look pretty stupid four or eight years from now.

This raises the question about bundling. Are bundled contributions small or large? Wouldn't the bundlers be considered large donors, or at least surrogate equivalents?

I've donated a total of $125, in amounts of $25 every month for five months. I've only made one other donation to a campaign, and that was a one-time donation to Howard Dean in 2004 at a campaign event. At the time I thought the donation was meaningless because it didn't amount to much, but my date convinced me it would at least help pay for refreshments. Using, I guess, the same kind of logic that people who don't bother to vote use, it never occurred to me that my donation might make a real difference before because I knew I couldn't donate a lot, and I always thought of doners as donating huge sums of money. Obama's campaign has made me feel EMPOWERED. I think this has been a key difference of Obama's campaign that Brooks' criticism overlooks. Campaigns are usually largely funded by people who symbolize power or money.

Of course two hundred dollars or less is not going to make up the bulk of the money, but at 45% of the totals, that's still a huge number of small doners. What it says is that the PERCENTAGE of small doners is larger than the percentage of large doners. That's the percentage I'm interested in, because I agree with Michael -- I'm more impressed by the numbers of doners than by amount of money they've coughed up.   Because I'm guessing that it's the sense of empowerment  Obama's generated that is fueling these kinds of numbers.

Cool. Thanks Jason, for just looking up the data, so you could actually answer Andrew's question. I guess he thought it was rhetorical... maybe that's what makes the difference between a journalist and a talking head...

And all along I though my $100 contribution counted as big money.

What next, my $43K salary is "just a bit above average?"

Holy emasculation!

I really think people are missing the point here. It's really not about what percentage of his total fundraising sum came from donations of $200 or less (that'd be 45%); what really matters is how many people donated that much. I think it's up to 1.8 million donors now right? And the VAST VAST majority of them are donating small sums.

So yes, Obama is doing exceptionally well among big donors too. But he's also far outraised Bush, which means that that 45% is a much much larger sum, coming from hundreds of thousands more donors.  

The number of donors is much more significant than what percentage of his net fundraising total they've contributed. It means an unprecedented number of Americans are actually investing monetarily into his campaign.

jgerbs711, I was pretty sure I was correct. But seeing another genius posting same-same stuff is always a relief.

jgerbs is spot on. the difference between obama and others is the NUMBER of small donors, not the percentage. The percentage looks good to goo-goo good government types who don't think money=speech like me, but the NUMBER of people is actually what interests the folks like me who understand that when citizens make small donations, they feel like they have ownership of their democracy, and that's a good thing.

PS: Public financing with $85 million is ANTI-DEMOCRATIC because it limits the amount of states where Obama can get his message past the lazy media filter. Anyone who argues for it needs to get out of their ivory tower to see how much it costs to mobilize voters in more than 11 states...

Agreed with the above comments.  It's the number of small doners, not the percentage, that makes a grassroots movement.  If I ran for municipal dog catcher and squeezed ten bucks out of each member of my family, and I contributed $250 to my own campaign, a whopping 80% of my donors would be small, but large grassroots movement it ain't.

  scire, at first I did feel empowered but after a bit it became more diluted and felt a responsibility to do more than be part of the dollar total.  There may be a psychological component where spending money confers a sense of ownership so those millions of people have more than a cash investment.  Other people could 'talk' about their candidate but not many passed a simple test of conviction by opening their wallet.

  A note from the campaign today even translated the $'s into "states, offices, staff" and I think the millions of donors see that as a more tangible expenditure than advertising. Or, they're spending our money on real people to get more people like us.  

agreed with scire. I'm the same (except my one previous donation was to edwards in 2004). I feel more involved having given money than I have voting; and every time things sounded bad for obama, I went back and gave more money.

"order of magnitude"? Does Zengerle know what that phrase actually means?

If so, how on earth did he ever come to believe that Obama's small-donor _percentage_ controbution was TEN TIMES that of previous candidates?

The Obam-olatry has really gotten out of hand. Someday, someone will assemble all the ridiculous grand claims for this guy and give us all a good laugh. I'm especially enjoying today's contortions by dedicated secularists (whose views I share re. the malign influence on US politics of on-your-sleeve religiosity) in defense of Obama's relentlessly smarmy and opportunistic attempt to flaunt his piety in order to get votes.