Will 1% of the voting population donate to Obama's campaign?

Obama's campaign announced last week that it had set a new fundrasing record in February of over $55 million, surpassing the previous record holder... Barack Obama circa January 2008.

More interesting is the number of donors contributing to Obama's campaign. This past month his campaign surpassed 1 million contributors, most of whom have given online in dollar amounts less than $100. Joe Trippi, the campaign strategist who pioneered the bottom-up fundraising and organizing in Howard Dean's 2004 campaign, has said of Obama's strategy, "We pioneered it and Obama perfected it." I'll leave it to people like Ari Berman to discuss the totality of the Dean legacy, but in 2004, Dean and Trippi brilliantly capitalized on the social networking power of the internet to get hundreds of fed up citizens to "buy into" the campaign.

Now, Obama is poised to hit a previously unheard of benchmark in fundraising: a contribution from over 1% of general election voters. How does he get there? Well in 2004, over 121 million people voted in the general election. Being extremely loose and liberal, lets say that 150 million people will vote in this election (NB: This estimate is probably exaggerated by about 15-25 million). Since Obama's fundraising emails have a flash applet that updates and timestamps the total number of donors to the campaign, many people have been tracking the donor totals online (see here and here). Using this data and assuming that the number of new donors to his campaign continues to increase at its current declining rate, Obama should reach this goal by sometime around June 13th (making it an extra special birthday for me). Consequently, if the present delegate trends in the primary election continue (see Janak's postings), Obama will deliver his nomination speech in Denver on August 25th to a county where over 1% have already bought a stake in seeing him succeed.