Since Kamala Harris emerged as the Democratic presidential frontrunner – and then the party’s official candidate – following President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the race a little more than a month ago, donations for her campaign have been pouring in.

Harris’s campaign said this week that it had raised about $540m in that time – the largest amount raised by any political campaign in such a short period of time.

This fundraising milestone is significant, said Patrick Frank, former outreach director of ActBlue, the largest online fundraising platform for the Democratic Party and outreach director for Lunda, a platform for small donors fundraising in Europe.

“It is definitely one of one. This is a unique amount,” he told Al Jazeera. The only parallel? “I would say that there’s probably some comparison out there to disaster relief funds that are able to generate just as much,” he added.

But in a country where political campaigns are often beholden to large fundraising machines known as super PACs, the Harris campaign also stands out for the dramatic flood of money it is receiving from small donors.

Of the $497m in funding that Harris received as of August 20, roughly 42 percent of the money had come from 631,000 such small donors – those who contribute less than $200 – according to Open Secrets, a non-for-profit organisation based in Washington, DC that tracks and publishes data related on political campaign financing.

In all, candidates for the 2024 US presidential election across the political spectrum have raised roughly $1.5bn so far from small and large donors.

How does Harris’s funding surge compare with Trump’s war chest?

Overall, Harris has built a commanding funding lead over former President Donald Trump, her Republican opponent in the November election.

According to filings with the Federal Election Commission, by the end of July, Harris had approximately $489m in her war chest, compared with $265m for Trump.

In just the week of the Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Chicago, from August 19 to August 22, when Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, accepted their nominations, their campaign drew $82m in funding, according to a memo from Jen O’Malley Dillon, Harris’s campaign manager.

“This is the most ever for any presidential campaign in this time span,” Dillon said.

And Harris also leads Trump when it comes to small donors: The entrepreneur-turned-politician has secured 32 percent of his campaign funding from small donors, compared with Harris’s 42 percent.

Yet Harris still lags behind one previous campaign when it comes to small donor support: During his 2008 run, Barack Obama received roughly 44 percent of his funding from small donors, according to Open Secrets. And Obama bettered that record during his re-election campaign.

What is considered a small donation?

In 1971, the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) was passed to regulate campaign financing. It required candidates to disclose their contributions and spending for their election campaigns.

Although the FECA did not explicitly track small donations at the time, a small donation can range anywhere from $1 to $200 sent to a candidate’s political campaign or a political action committee.

Typically, who are small donors?

In a working paper (not peer-reviewed) published (PDF) by the National Bureau of Economic Research, a private nonprofit organisation, and updated in July 2024, economists Laurent Bouton, Julia Cage, Edgard Dewitte and Vincent Pons tried to break down the demographics of small donors.

They found that “small donors tend to be more representative of the overall population than large donors”.

• Women account for 37.5 percent of large donors, as compared with 54.1 percent of small donors.
• 89.4 percent of large donors are white. Only 3.9 percent are Black, 3.6 percent Hispanic, and 3 percent Asian, against 11.5 percent, 14.5 percent and 5.1 percent respectively in the overall population. Ethnic minorities are also underrepresented among small donors, but less so: 6.7 percent of them are Black, 7.3 percent Hispanic, and 3.5 percent  Asian. However small the fraction is of small donors who are ethnic minorities, it is still two-thirds higher than that same fraction for large donors.
• The researchers also found that between 2006 and 2020, the number of contributions increased while mean contribution amounts decreased, from $292 to $60.

When did the rise in small donations begin?

According to Frank, it was Howard Dean, the former governor of Vermont, who ran for the Democratic nomination in the 2004 presidential election, who brought small donations to the fore.

“One of the keys to Kamala Harris’s fundraising is the media attention driving the narrative but with Dean, it was actually the fundraising driving the media,” he said.

Yet small donations really took off with Barak Obama’s 2007 primary campaign against Hillary Clinton, when he raised a total of $750m, with roughly $335m coming from small donors, according to Open Secrets.

By Obama’s 2011 primary run for the 2012 US presidential election, the amount contributed by small donors had surged to almost 50 percent. In the process, he doubled the amount of small-donor donations he had received four years earlier.

How have candidates since Obama fared with small donors?

Candidates who pitch themselves as outsiders, and take on key corporates and Wall Street often end up depending disproportionately on small donors.

According to the Guardian in February 2020, Bernie Sanders managed to raise $10m through from 350,000 first-time donors within a week of launching his 2020 presidential campaign. On average, each contribution amounted to approximately $27.

According to Frank, Sanders would likely have won a lot more from small donors had he secured the 2020 Democratic Party nomination, which went to Biden.

Although political activist Cornel West, competing for the presidency in 2024, has not raised anywhere close to the hundreds of millions of dollars secured by Harris or Trump, he has received 53 percent of the $1.1m in his campaign chest from small donors, according to Open Secrets.

How has Trump done with small donors?

Though he trails Harris, Trump retains strong support from small donors, said analysts.

“Donald Trump has been one of the most successful small donor fundraisers of the last decade,” Frank said. “He’s in the top three. It’s going to be Harris, Biden, Trump, Bernie.”

And while Harris is far ahead in overall funding, there too, Trump has had his moments of surge – including among small donors.

After Trump was convicted on 34 felony charges in Manhattan in May, the Trump campaign announced that it had raised $52.8m within 24 hours. This overwhelming surge of donations caused the WinRed platform, a platform for accepting small GOP donations, to crash due to the high traffic it received.

Yet in July, Trump’s campaign raised $139m, far less than the $310m reported by the Harris campaign, despite the focus on the Republican National Convention and an assassination attempt on Trump.

What is driving the rise in small donations?

Campaigns have been able to utilise social media and online platforms in ways that were much harder in a pre-digital era, analysts said, resulting in a shift towards small-dollar online donations. Digital technology has made it easier for campaigns to reach a wide audience and mobilise grassroots support, and for small donors to contribute financially.

Whether small donors will be able to compete with large donors in terms of political influence remains unclear, but Frank remains optimistic.

“My vision for what an ideal situation would be looks a lot like the Elizabeth Warren campaign in 2020,” he said. Warren, according to Frank, had enough wealthy donors lining up. “But the rule on the campaign was there are no advantages to the amount that you gave me.”

That, he said, should be the goal for political campaigns.

“If you can give more, give more, but don’t expect anything in return for it,” he said. “I already think we’re at a place in the Democratic Party where big donors are frustrated that they don’t have the influence that they [think they should] have.”