White House hopeful Bernie Sanders has generated more individual donations than any presidential campaign in history.
In an announcement released on Sunday, the Independent Vermont senator’s campaign said that it had raised money from more than 2.3 million separate donations, besting the 2.2 million record President Barack Obama set on Dec. 31, 2011, during his reelection campaign.
Late last week, Sanders announced that he had surpassed 2 million individual donations, more than any non-incumbent presidential candidate.
The surge in donations comes amid a fight between Sanders and the Democratic National Committee, which on Friday temporarily suspended his campaign’s access to a key voter database after Sanders staffers improperly accessed data belonging to challenger Hillary Clinton. The access was possible due to a bug in the database user protections.
The move by the DNC may have ignited enthusiasm among Sanders supporters, who raised more than $1 million on Friday, according to the Washington Post. The average contribution raised during Saturday night’s debate was $25, according to the Sanders campaign.
The DNC restored the Sanders campaigns’ access to the voter database on Saturday after the senator’s campaign sued the Democratic Party the day before for violating the agreement over access to the voter database and just hours before Sanders and Clinton took the stage for the third Democratic debate of the 2016 primary season.
The Sanders campaign has fired one staffer and suspended two others over the data breach, which is said to have included proprietary data gathered by the Clinton campaign, much of which detailed voters in the early voting states of Iowa and New Hampshire.
The 12-page federal lawsuit filed by the Sanders campaign in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia said that the campaign had raised $2.4 million between Dec. 14 and Dec. 16. For the third quarter of 2015, Sanders raised a total of $26 million, just $2 million shy of Clinton’s $28 million haul.
Clinton continues to lead Sanders in national polls by an average of 25.7 points, according to Real Clear Politics. More important, however, are polls from early voting states, which have Clinton leading by an average 14.9 points in Iowa, while Sanders leads by an average of 8.6 points in New Hampshire.
The first ballots of the 2016 election will be cast in Iowa on Feb. 1, followed by New Hampshire on Feb. 9.
H/T Huffington Post | Photo via Gage Skidmore/Flickr (CC By 2.0) | Remix by Max Fleishman
