It’s hard out there for a rich person who’s not quite as rich as his or her friends. First one percenters had to wash their own dishes, then there was the rush on bargain castles, and now millionaires are feeling completely left out of presidential politics, according to the Washington Post. Terry Neese, who raised more than $1 million for George W. Bush, says that 2016 candidates “are only going to people who are multi-multi-millionaires and billionaires and raising big money first. Most of the people I talk to are kind of rolling their eyes and saying, ‘You know, we just don’t count anymore.’”
Another Republican fund-raiser told the Post that bundling for candidates doesn’t look like much fun anymore either. “Bundlers felt they were part of the process and made a difference, and therefore were delighted to participate,” he said. “But when you look at super PAC money and the large donations that we’re seeing, the regular bundlers feel a little disenfranchised.”
However, there’s no reason for these ignored donors to feel left out. It turns out that most of the country isn’t getting asked to donate gobs of money to electoral campaigns either! According to the Sunlight Foundation, “more than a quarter of the nearly $6 billion in contributions from identifiable sources in [2012] came from just 31,385 individuals, a number equal to one ten-thousandth of the U.S. population.”
