Dems Score Big From Internet In 2012

(Image is from the website Examiner.com.)

Everyone knows that President Obama's campaign in both 2008 and 2012 was able to get big money from the internet, but he's not the only one. Other Democrats are learning to use the internet to tap into small donors for big bucks. And that includes the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) -- which raises money to support Democrats running for the U.S. House of Representatives.

In the 2008 and 2010 election periods the DCCC had raised 5% and 9% of its total donations online. In 2012 that percentage jumped to about one-third of all their donations. Internet donations amounted to $14.6 million dollars online. In 2012 the online donations for the DCCC climbed to $49.3 million (a jump of more than 237%). This allowed the DCCC to do something it almost never does -- to out-raise its GOP counterpart (the RCCC). In fact, the DCCC raised $28 million more than the RCCC in 2012.

And this is mostly small donors giving this money. The average internet donation to the DCCC was only $31. It goes to show that those small donations can really add up when you get enough of them -- and the DCCC got a lot of them. They even scored some million dollars internet days for the first time. On the day after the Republican National Convention, the DCCC raised $1.3 million on the internet. And in the 48 hours after Paul Ryan's acceptance speech at that convention, $2.3 million was raised (more than the RCCC raised from small donors in the entire month of August 2012).

Howard Dean was the first to recognize the potential of the internet as a source of donor money, and President Obama turned getting internet donations into an art form. Now it looks like the rest of the Democratic Party has learned from them -- and learned very well.