Clinton Appealing More to Women Donors While Obama Targets Younger Professionals

The Washington Post has an interesting story today about Clinton stepping up her appeals to women donors. The Clinton campaign has decided that women donors are an untapped resource for political contributions. The Clinton campaign is developing explicit strategies to solicit donations from women, different from those used to solicit from men.

Meanwhile the Obama campaign is targeting what it calls "Generation O" for political donations. While the campaign believes that such donors can't always give the maximum donations, they can give donations in the $500 range. The Obama campaign, two days after announcing its first-quarter fundraising totals, announced that it had received contributions from another 40,000 people via the internet. If those contributions averaged just $25.00 per donation, that would be another $1,000,000.00 raised via the internet.

All of this is good for both the Democratic Party in particular and progressives in general. Once people get active politically a lot of them stay active. People who get involved in presidential campaigns in 2008 will be people that can be motivated for future campaigns. Not all of them, to be sure, but enough of them to make a difference in future campaigns. What is sometimes overlooked is that campaigning is like any other activity, the more you do it, the better you become at it. Volunteers who participate next year in the 2008 presidential campaign will be more experienced when they help out in future campaigns.

Further, since presidential campaigns have to list their donors, local party and progressive organizations will have the ability to access these donors for other campaigns. People who make political donations in 2008 will be people who might make such donations in the future.

You can click on the link in this entry's title to read the Washington Post article.