A Media Lesson: First The Data / Then An Explantion

Data: 2019 Federal Election Commission filings.
Donations do not include funds from political committees or the candidates themselves. Chart: Danielle Alberti/Axios

First Glance

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Stef W. Kight1 hour ago
LINK > AXIOS

The 2020 Democratic candidates winning the money game
Skip Ahead > The other side: The billionaires are playing a whole different game. 99.9% of all the money brought into Bloomberg's campaign came from Bloomberg himself, with the remaining 0.1% came from a category titled "Other Receipts (Dividends, Interest, etc)." In just over one month, he spent more than two times as much as Sanders in all of 2019. He also spent more than the Trump campaign did all last year...

What to watch: Biden has raised and spent less money than other frontrunners, and he is starting off 2020 with the least amount of money on hand out of the top 5 candidates. But he has remained the candidate to beat in national polls since even before he announced his candidacy.

• While money can't buy you the White House, Bloomberg has surpassed Buttigieg in national polls just two months after officially announcing his presidential bid — squeaking into the top four, according to Real Clear Politics.
• Businessman Yang managed to out-raise and out-spend Sen. Amy Klobuchar, who snatched one of the New York Times' endorsement. But Yang's standing in the polls has changed little — he failed to qualify for the last Democratic debate and is starting the year off with less money than any other candidates Axios analyzed.

Go deeper: 2020 presidential election: Track the candidates