How much Money has Obama raised in 2008?

That's a good question, but it's one that outsiders to the Obama campaign can't answer right now, because the Obama camp has stopped publishing the fundraising amount, and instead just listed the number of donations they've received so far this year. Not advertising the actual amount of money raised was probably a good move for the Obama team, as this just sparked the Clinton team to rally around "Look how much Obama's getting in donations... we need to match/beat that". Since the Clinton campaign will never be able to match the number of individual donations the Obama campaign has received, the number of people that have donated is probably a much better number to post.

However my brother asked me to do a projection based upon the number of donations this year, and I think that's a good idea so we can get a rough estimate. According to Time, Obama raised over $100 Million last year from about 470,000 unique donors. According to this blog Obama has an average donation size of about $250. If we do the math, it comes out to $117.5 million, so I suspect the actual average donation was smaller: something like $215 per donor.

According to http://barackobama.com, nearly 437,000 people have donated so far this year, which is nearly as many has have donated last year, and we're only in the middle of the first quarter. According to the figures from the Obama campaign, they raised $32 million in the month of January from 250,000 donors, which is an average donation of $128 per donor. I would guess that donation amounts have increased since then, just based upon repeat donations due to Obama's success in the recent primaries. However, I don't have any hard data on this, so I'll just provide some rough estimates given a few scenarios:

• Low estimate: Average donations stayed at $128/donor: ~$56 million
• Medium estimate: Average donations went to $175/donor: ~$76.5 million
• High estimate: Average donations increased to $215/donor: ~94 million
  

As a point of reference, I donated about $200 this year, and my brother donated around $400 total (probably most of which happened this year). Given this highly representative sample, let's assume a Very high estimated average of $300/person:

• Very high estimate: Average donations increased to $300/donor: $131 million

Hillary Clinton's campaign is advertising that they raised $13 million since Feb 5th, I bet when the Q1 fundraising figures come out, we'll find that Obama either doubled or tripled Clinton's figure. Clinton's January fundraising figure was $13.5 million -- so assuming a modest 50% increase from that based upon her new underdog status, let's assume she raises $20.25 million per quarter, that's $60.75 million for Q1 2008. If we ignore the numbers above, and conservatively assume Obama's $32 million per month holds up, he'll have $96 million from the first quarter, compared to Hillary's $60.75 million. Using the estimates above, given that we are 50^ through the quarter, we can try doubling those figures:

• Low Q1 estimate: Average donations stayed at $128/donor: ~$106 million
• Medium Q1 estimate: Average donations went to $175/donor: ~$150million
• High Q1 estimate: Average donations increased to $215/donor: ~$188 million
  

Even using the low estimate, assuming things stay on pace, Obama would raise nearly as much in the quarter as he raised all of last year.