It was a few weeks before Hillary Clinton would announce her 2016 presidential bid, and she was already worried about money.
“Can we discuss the fundraising plans for first quarter?” her top aide Huma Abedin wrote to other senior staffers in March 2015, noting that Clinton was concerned.
“Is the issue that she’s doing too much? Too little?” asked campaign manager Robby Mook.
Abedin’s succinct reply: “JEB BUSH.”
At the time, donors to the former Florida governor were socking millions into a super PAC, pushing the limits of campaign-finance rules. The stockpiling of seven-figure checks before Bush even declared candidacy spurred a flurry of anxious conversations between Clinton and her staff, according to hacked emails posted by WikiLeaks.
But the former secretary of state had her own financial weapon: a network of political backers that she and her husband, former president Bill Clinton, had methodically cultivated over 40 years.
Determined not to fall behind in the money race, Hillary Clinton ramped up her appeals to rich donors and shrugged off restrictions that President Barack Obama had imposed on his fundraising team.
Even as her advisers fretted about the perception that she was too cozy with wealthy interests, they agreed to let lobbyists bundle checks for her campaign, including those representing some foreign governments, the emails show. Top aides wooed major donors for super PACs, taking advantage of the leeway that campaigns have to legally collaborate with the groups on fundraising.
The effort paid off. Together with the party and pro-Clinton super PACs, the Democratic nominee had amassed $1.14 billion to support her campaign by the end of September – on par with what Obama and his allies brought in for his 2012 re-election bid. GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump, who did not begin fundraising in earnest until the end of May, had collected $712 million, including $56 million of his own money.
Unlike Obama, Clinton fully embraced super PACs from the very beginning of her race, helping pull in larger checks from donors than the president did. An analysis by The Washington Post found that more than a fifth of the $1 billion donated to help her bid was given by just 100 wealthy individuals and labor unions – many with a long history of contributing to the Clintons. The analysis included contributions to her campaigns, joint fundraising committees, national parties, convention host committees and single-candidate super PACs.
The top five donors together contributed $1 out of every $17 for her 2016 run: hedge fund manager S. Donald Sussman ($20.6 million); Chicago venture capitalist J.B. Pritzker and his wife, M.K. ($16.7 million); Univision chairman Haim Saban and his wife, Cheryl ($11.9 million); hedge fund titan George Soros ($9.9 million); and SlimFast founder S. Daniel Abraham ($9.7 million).
Since modern-day campaign finance rules were put in place in the 1970s in the wake of the Watergate scandal, no president has ever been elected with the help of wealthy contributors who doled out such huge sums. The possibilities changed with the 2010 advent of super PACs, which can accept unlimited sums from individuals and corporations.
“I would prefer if the limits were much smaller, but that’s the way it is,” Abraham, 92, said in an interview. He and his late wife made 26 contributions to the Clintons’ campaigns between 1994 and 2008, which together totaled $461,000, according to a database built by The Post. This year, he has given nearly 21 times that amount.
Sussman, Clinton’s top backer, said his top priority is dismantling the big-money system that has flourished in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision.
“It’s very odd to be giving millions when your objective is to actually get the money out of politics,” Sussman said. “I am a very strong supporter of publicly financed campaigns, and I think the only way to accomplish that is to get someone like Secretary Clinton, who is committed to cleaning up the unfortunate disaster created by the activist court in Citizens United.”
