Bernie Sanders nearly matched Hillary Clinton's fundraising in the last quarter – raising an eye-popping $26 million to Clinton’s $28 million – and multiple sources on Clinton’s team told POLITICO they expect him to beat her when the next financial disclosures are filed next week. | AP Photo Clinton donors say Sanders is raising more than the front-runner Her team lowers expectations with one cash-dash week to go in 2015. 
 
 Hillary Clinton’s donors say they think Bernie Sanders will raise more money in the fourth quarter than their candidate for the first time ever — a testament to the underdog’s online cash juggernaut and a harbinger of donor fatigue among the front-runner’s backers. 
 
 Clinton campaign officials said she remains on track to reach her goal of $100 million for the primary by the end of the year; she had already collected $77 million by the end of the third quarter. 
 
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 But Sanders nearly matched Clinton in the most recent quarter — raising an eye-popping $26 million to Clinton’s $28 million — and multiple fundraising sources on Clinton’s team told POLITICO they expect the Vermont senator to beat her when the next financial disclosures are filed on Jan. 30, just before the Iowa caucuses. 
 
 “People are feeling very complacent — and more reluctant to contribute — because they don’t take Bernie Sanders that seriously,” top Clinton donor Alan Patricof told POLITICO. “They look at the other side and think, how could anyone possibly back any one of them? The attitude of sensible people is that she's the only one who makes any sense.” None of the donors or campaign insiders POLITICO spoke with Monday disputed the notion that Sanders was on track to beat them in the end-of-year cash race. 
 
 Low-balling your candidate’s fundraising totals is a time-honored practice in presidential politics: If Clinton somehow manages to come out on top, her campaign can portray the quarter as exceeding expectations — no easy feat in a race where she is leading Sanders by 20 to 30 percentage points nationally. 
 
 But the concern appears to be real. Over the past few days, Clinton’s advisers have taken steps to stoke donor enthusiasm: Bill and Chelsea Clinton, who on Monday announced she is pregnant with her second child, have stepped up their fundraising for the campaign. They are expected to become even more involved in the campaign beginning in January. 
 
 And many of the donors POLITICO has interviewed over the last few months say the widespread perception that’s she’s a shoo-in is prompting would-be donors to remain on the sidelines — waiting to throw their financial support behind her for the only race they believe truly matters — the general election. 
 
 “Let Bernie outraise her — he’s not going to be the nominee,” a top donor said. “The idea that Donald Trump or Ted Cruz could actually be the president is going to be the greatest fundraising mechanism in the history of the world, and it’s just too early for that.” 
 
 A sign that Clinton’s donors are more eager to donate to a general election campaign than a primary they see as already in the bag was the success of the high-dollar Victory Fund event last week. There, donors wrote $32,400 checks that are split between the national and state Democratic parties. 
 
 Still, Sanders’ surge has less to do with a Clinton swoon — she’s raising cash at a respectable clip — than the Vermont independent’s wildfire appeal to small-money donors, which reminds many Clinton veterans of Barack Obama’s surprising fundraising prowess during the 2008 campaign. 
 
 For its part, Sanders’ campaign has been touting its large number of small contributions as a sign of the grass-roots power behind his candidacy. On Saturday, Sanders announced his campaign broke a record by bringing in more individual contributions than any presidential candidate in history — even topping the 2.2 million donations Obama received by the end of 2011 during his reelection campaign. Plus, Sanders’ team says it raised more than $1 million after the Democratic National Committee temporarily suspended the campaign’s access to its own voter files over a data breach last week. 
 
 Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver on Monday refused to comment on whether he expected to outpace Clinton’s fundraising by the end of the year. 
 
 While Sanders has been building up a grass-roots list of small donors who can be tapped and tapped again for donations throughout the campaign, Clinton’s team targeted its list of core supporters early and had many donors write the maximum checks of $2,700 months ago. “Those of us who snap to attention when she snaps her fingers — they tapped into that a long time ago,” said one top Clinton donor who has hosted a house party for the candidate. 
 
 But the campaign is aware that maxing out its donors early could become a long-term issue and is actively trying to court a new crowd. It has dispatched high-profile surrogates like former Obama campaign manager David Plouffe, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, political consultant James Carville and former Clinton aide Lisa Caputo to host “salons” — free events where they talk about the campaign and take questions from attendees, hoping to inspire fresh donor faces to become involved. 
 
 “This was part of a series of events with surrogates meant to encourage new raisers and donors to get involved in the campaign and grow our network,” a campaign official said of the free events. 
 
 Even if Clinton manages to make up lost ground between now and year’s end, Sanders’ success with grass-roots donors and Clinton’s dependence on the big-money contributors her opponent decries as out-of-touch plutocrats creates a PR problem for her campaign. 
 
 “About 3 percent of my donations come from people in the finance and investment world,” she said at Saturday’s debate, playing defense against Sanders’ charge that she is a tool of Wall Street. “I have more donations from students and teachers than I do from people associated with Wall Street.” 
 
 But the truth is, her campaign and the super PAC supporting her received $5.7 million from the securities and investments industry, out of $97.8 million total. That’s almost 6 percent. It’s closer to 3 percent if you only count fundraising by her official campaign. But in the context of a clash with Sanders, who doesn’t have an allied super PAC, it’s misleading to overlook hers. 
 
 Isaac Arnsdorf contributed to this report. ||||| AP Photo 2016 Clinton raises $28 million but Sanders’ haul is too close for comfort 
 
 Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton’s campaign barely outpaced Bernie Sanders’ in the third quarter of 2015, a surprising development that shows the insurgent candidate’s strength while the former secretary of state struggles. 
 
 Clinton’s operation raised more than $28 million in the third quarter after a grueling fundraising schedule, compared with about $26 million for the Vermonter — who raised his money largely from online donations, and few in-person fundraising events. 
 
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 The narrow gap illustrates Sanders’ momentum in the third quarter, as he overtook Clinton in polling in both New Hampshire and Iowa. But Clinton’s overall fundraising machine remains formidable: combined with the $47.5 million she raised in the second quarter, her campaign has brought in roughly $75 million in six months. Sanders, by comparison, raised just $15 million in his first few months. 
 
 While considerably less than her first haul, Clinton's $28 million figure doesn’t come as a huge surprise to her team. The campaign had expected her numbers to drop during the summer months, while she was dogged by questions about her email practices at the State Department and falling poll numbers in the early-voting states. 
 
 "We are thrilled and grateful for the support of hundreds of thousands of donors across the country, helping us raise a record $75 million in the first two quarters," said Clinton's campaign manager Robby Mook in a statement. 
 
 The campaign's joint fundraising committee with the Democratic National Committee and state parties brought in over $3 million, the campaign said. 
 
 But Sanders’ own eye-popping haul — he raised $2.07 million online on Sept 30 alone — gives Democrats reason for pause. Much of the party establishment’s argument against Sanders centers on whether he could stand head to head against a well-funded Republican in the general election. His now-demonstrated fundraising prowess hardly erases such concerns, but it calls the assumption into question. 
 
 Clinton’s allies also take solace in knowing that she has affiliated super PACs with considerable fundraising power, while Sanders refuses to associate with any such groups. Priorities USA Action, the big-money Clinton group, told POLITICO it had raised $40 million so far in 2015 by mid-August. 
 
 Sanders’ campaign said on Wednesday that it had passed the one-million contributor mark in the third quarter, while Clinton’s own operation said that 93 percent of her third-quarter donations came in increments of less than $100. 
 
 The full disclosures for the period that ended Sept. 30 will be released next week, and filings from both contenders will be scrutinized not only for the details about where the money came from but how the campaign then spent it. ||||| Photo Advertisement Continue reading the main story 
 
 WASHINGTON — Donna Mae Litowitz, a Miami Beach retiree, likes Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont so much that three months ago she sent his presidential campaign $10,000. His campaign sent back all but $2,700 because it was more than he was allowed to take under federal election law, but she wishes he had kept it all. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 “I like what Sanders stands for, and he says what needs to be said,” said Ms. Litowitz, who gave money in 2008 to Senator Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. “And I don’t like Hillary Clinton.” 
 
 In an election dominated by million-dollar donations to “super PACs,” Ms. Litowitz qualifies in Mr. Sanders’s insurgent campaign as a big donor. Unlike almost all of the other major Democratic and Republican candidates this year, Mr. Sanders has refused to accept support from super PACs, relying instead on supporters like Ms. Litowitz as well as tens of thousands of small donors giving as little as $5 or $10. 
 
 The average donation, according to campaign officials, is $31.30. 
 
 The result is a campaign built on populist issues like income inequality that appears to be drawing even more rank-and-file support than Mr. Obama did in 2008, when he used a network of smaller donors to win the White House. 
 
 About a quarter of Mr. Obama’s donors over the course of that campaign gave a total of $200 or less, according to a study by the Campaign Finance Institute. While direct comparisons are difficult at this early stage in the 2016 race, Mr. Sanders’s small-dollar support appears significantly higher than Mr. Obama’s in 2008, and more than any other candidate this cycle. 
 
 Mr. Sanders has raised more money in gifts of $200 or less than any candidate, Democrat or Republican, an analysis of campaign finance reports shows. A huge chunk of his money — $11.4 million, or about 75 percent of all his contributions — has come from small donations routed through ActBlue, an online site that facilitates contributions to Democrats, records show. 
 
 The influx of support has helped Mr. Sanders build a formidable war chest, with his campaign raising $15.2 million as of the most recent filings with the Federal Election Commission in July. Campaign officials say he has raised millions more since then and will far surpass that total this quarter. That still puts him far behind Mrs. Clinton’s fund-raising juggernaut, but Mr. Sanders said in an interview that he was unbowed. 
 
 “We will be greatly outspent, yes, but we will raise enough money to wage a winning campaign,” he said. 
 
 Democratic strategists are beginning to take notice. 
 
 “His money is very impressive,” said Bill Burton, a former aide to Mr. Obama who helped found Priorities USA, a super PAC that is now supporting Mrs. Clinton’s bid for the Democratic nomination and has received donations of at least $1 million each from a number of big Democratic donors like Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg, George Soros and Haim Saban. 
 
 But Mr. Sanders’s fund-raising strategy will test the prevailing notion in Washington that no candidate can successfully compete on the national stage without tapping into the many millions of dollars that have poured into super PACs since the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in 2010. 
 
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 Super PACs supporting Mrs. Clinton have already raised more than $20 million, records show; on the Republican side, two super PACs backing Jeb Bush raised about $108.5 million. 
 
 Yet when a Vermont legislator, Chris Pearson, offered to set up a super PAC to support the Sanders campaign, Mr. Sanders told him to “kill it,” Mr. Sanders said, because did not want to be beholden to “the millionaires and billionaires.” 
 
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 Mr. Sanders said that it was “a difficult decision” to opt out of such a powerful and quick way to raise money. In doing so, he said, “we’re giving up millions and millions of dollars, no doubt, but we will sink or swim based on what we get from the middle class of the country.” 
 
 Nor has Mr. Sanders held many of the kind of fund-raisers that presidential candidates traditionally devote much of their time to. He has held only five, and they have been more like political rallies, held at places like a Washington, D.C., brewery and a Seattle tavern, with a contribution of $100 or less sometimes required. 
 
 Jeff Weaver, the campaign manager for Mr. Sanders, said in an interview that “it’s absolutely possible to win without the super PACs.” 
 
 Mr. Weaver said that the campaign had been able to leverage the big turnouts seen at rallies — he estimated the combined crowds at three recent West Coast events at 70,000 — by following up by phone or email seeking donations. 
 
 “The fund-raising from our standpoint is going phenomenally,” Mr. Weaver said. “We’re way ahead of where we thought we would be.” 
 
 Even so, Mr. Sanders in the last quarter raised less than a third as much as Mrs. Clinton, whose campaign reported contributions of $47.5 million in the spring quarter. 
 
 But Mr. Sanders and his aides say they can blunt the effect of Mrs. Clinton’s financial advantage by running a more frugal campaign, even as they build campaign operations in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina. 
 
 So far, the more-with-less approach is holding up. 
 
 In his filings to the election commission, Mr. Sanders reported spending only about $3 million — or less than 20 percent of the money he had raised. Mrs. Clinton, in comparison, reported spending at about twice that rate, or about $18.7 million — nearly 39 percent of her contributions — on things like catering at fund-raisers and slick media productions. (Her campaign asked for approval from the election commission this month to allow donors to pay for their own food, drinks and valet parking at some events.) 
 
 Mr. Sanders was left with $12.1 million in cash on hand at the end of June, and Mrs. Clinton had $28.9 million. 
 
 “When you know you’re not going to raise as much as your opponent, you have to make every dollar count,” Mr. Weaver said.
– Bernie Sanders is raising a lot more money than many people expected, and he's doing it a lot faster. His campaign announced just before the Wednesday filing deadline that it has received more than a million online donations, making him the first 2016 candidate to pass that milestone and the first ever to pass it so early, reports the Wall Street Journal, which notes that the Obama campaigns got there in February 2008 and October 2011. According to the filing, Sanders' fundraising is rapidly catching up with Hillary Clinton's, with the Vermont senator raising $25 million in the third quarter of this year, not far off the $28 million his rival raised during the same period, although her second-quarter numbers were much higher, CNN reports. Most of Clinton's cash in the third quarter came from the 58 fundraising events she headlined that asked donors to pay $2,700, CNN reports, while almost all of Sanders' take came from the online operation, which had an average donation of $24.86. But he has had to spend money to make money: The New York Times estimates that the Sanders campaign has already spent $15 million, mostly on hiring staff and on online fundraising, without spending much on commercials or polling. Politico calls his haul "eye-popping" and notes that it undercuts arguments that Sanders couldn't compete with a well-funded Republican. Clinton, however, has affiliated super PACs on her side and Sanders shuns such groups. (Polls show that Clinton is falling behind in New Hampshire.)