In just 15 short months, we’ll know who the next President of the United States will be.
Sure, 15 months seems far off, but with the plentiful amount of candidates who have tossed their names into the hat, there’s going to be plenty of news to keep up with until Nov. 8, 2016, when America decides who will be its next leader. And until then, there are going to be the key metrics that matter most to those in the payments industry.
Those metrics, of course, center on how much candidates are raising, spending, and through which platform they are powering those donations into their campaign headquarters. With candidates on both sides vying for the ever-so important millennial votes, leading a tech-savvy campaign — both from a recruitment and donation platform standpoint — could make or break a candidate winning over the attention and donation dollars from a voter.
But first, let’s start with who has been raising the most bucks. Bloomberg gathered data from the Federal Election Commission to break down how much candidates have raised and how much they have spent as of July 31. Here’s how those numbers break down:
To view how much of those candidate’s funding came from the campaign versus Super PACs/527s, visit Bloomberg’s full list.
While those candidates vie to be among the front runners when the primary season kicks off next spring, the payments battle is already underway to see which platform can garner the most attention. And so far, the most recent reports show that Stripe, the online payments platform, is already establishing itself as the front runner in the digital payments space.
A recent Forbes report indicated that roughly half of the presidential candidates in the race so far have signed on with Stripe, which has received more than $800,000 in donation processing fees from eight different campaigns as of the end of last quarter. That tally also comes from campaign filings with the Federal Election Commission.
Stripe’s Co-founder and President John Collison told Forbes that “campaigns get that tech and the velocity and quality of their tech teams really matter.”
“Over the course of a campaign, you have to build sophisticated commerce, [customer relations management] and data analytics platforms that work all the time. We’re now doing part of that for them,” he added.
Stripe’s role, along with other digital payments technology is becoming a staple of campaigns across both sides of the aisle. There have been campaign-specific sites hosted on Amazon Web Services instead of buying their own servers. Candidates have been using ride-hailing apps like Uber and Lyft rather than utilizing town cars.
Clearly, the modern ecosystem of the payments and commerce ecosystems have blended themselves into the modern-day election campaigns.
Another interesting statistic that came out of the campaign trail today was an Associated Press report that shows that close to 60 donations made up for about a third of all donations brought in so far for the presidential election. The AP analysis indicates that means a third of $380 million, or roughly $125 million, came from just 60 donations. What that means, however, is the trend of the super wealthy and the Super PACs are driving most of the presidential candidate donations.
“We have never seen an election like this, in which the wealthiest people in America are dominating the financing of the presidential election and as a consequence are creating enormous debts and obligations from the candidates who are receiving this financial support,” Fred Wertheimer, president of Democracy 21, a Washington-based group working toward limiting money in politics, told the AP.
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