Campaigns Cost Millions. Can You Spare a Dime?

In a drab hotel basement in Georgetown, Mary Jane Volk is teaching the nation's next generation of political fundraisers how to close the deal.

Want donors to dash off a big check to their favorite candidate? she asks a class of two dozen students. "Then you're going to have to kick them in the needs. You'll need to know exactly what's going to compel that donor to give."

So what makes someone give a candidate money these days? That riddle preoccupied every presidential candidate last week as they hustled to meet the June 30 deadline to file second-quarter fundraising reports. Set aside all the leaking and sniping about who has raked more into their coffers. The blunt truth is that the more our elections come to hinge upon TV and name recognition, the more they cost; and the more they cost, the more candidates need to get inside the brains of those who might support them.

At the elbows of aspiring pols sit political fundraising experts such as Volk -- masters of what you might call the "art of the ask" -- who say they know which words will turn interests and ideals into cold hard cash. In a blasé age in which pundits talk airily about whether New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg might drop $500 million on a White House bid, it's easy to forget the staggering weight of the transactions that undergird the U.S. political system. All those campaign lawn signs, get-out-the-vote drives, Web sites and (above all) 30-second television ads exist only because of the endless phone solicitations, e-mail blasts, direct-mail drops, cocktail parties and banquets through which courses the lifeblood of the modern-day campaign.

Through the middle of the last century, astute politicians kept supporters' names on index cards primed with details about each donor's life: their pets, their children's schools, the issues they most cared about. Those rudimentary "databases" were easy to handle because comparatively few people contributed. William McKinley raised $3.5 million in his bid for the presidency in 1896 from a handful of bankers and businessmen. But decades of stop-and-start campaign finance reform -- from the 1907 law banning corporate contributions to the 1975 creation of the Federal Election Commission to today -- have compelled candidates to plunge their hands deeper and deeper into the wallets of mainstream America.

Now, a combination of factors has made Joe Sixpack an even juicier target for candidates. This new landscape has also made successful fundraising training programs such as the one run by Emily's List (which calls itself a "a political network for pro-choice Democratic women" and helped candidates raise nearly $12 million in the 2006 election cycle) essential for wanna-be politicos learning the art of the ask.

First, another burst of campaign reform, passed in 2002 and known as McCain-Feingold, limited direct donations to a candidate to $2,300 and restricted the use of "soft" money -- although the Supreme Court recently loosened those restrictions. In the past, fundraisers hunted marlins; now, they're fishing for minnows. And they have to know how minnows think.

Second, technological changes -- especially the maturation of the Internet as a marketing tool -- have made it possible to net these minnows and gather unprecedented amounts of information about them.

And finally, campaign costs have exploded. The combined fee for the Democratic and Republican presidential campaigns has more than doubled in eight years ($448.9 million in 1996, $649.5 million in 2000 and $1.01 billion in 2004).

According to Michael Malbin, president of the Campaign Finance Institute, the push for the little donor really began in 2004, the first presidential campaign after McCain-Feingold. That year, he estimated, the number of people contributing to the presidential race was about 2.4 million, three times the number who gave in 2000. "When you add the fact that it was an intensely motivated electorate in a very partisan environment, it made for a perfect storm," he said. "But who knows if all the factors will work strongly this time?"

The presidential candidates seem on track to break the $1 billion record set in 2004, much of it from smaller donations. Sen. Barack Obama, an Illinois Democrat, took in money in more than 100,000 transactions during the first three months of 2007. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, a New York Democrat, was no slouch, either, persuading more than 60,000 to part with their cash.

The bulk of the money comes through "bundlers," who use their large social and business networks to find hundreds of people willing to write checks for amounts up to the federal limit. Picking up on George W. Bush's Pioneer and Ranger program, which rewarded big bundlers with perks and titles, former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani created his own version, with Pitchers, Sluggers, All-Stars, MVPs and Team Captains. Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney opened his campaign by gathering his bundlers in one room in a dialing-for-dollars marathon that garnered $6 million.