inevitability. we ve seen a demonstration project here that money is not determinative in politics. there s nobody out there saying i m a bush conservative, damn it. that doesn t exist. it was just that i m going to outspend everyone and make myself look inevitable. he right now has lost to ben carson in every poll for two months. 50% of republican voters, 50, have been behind the combination of trump, fiorina, and carson for two months. there is no establishment. long live the establishment. betsy, here s to me the bullish case, none of that hard none of those hard dollars count the superpac. superpac donors, he s got a huge well-funded superpac. superpac donors can ride in at any time with a million-dollar check. and we all remember like john mccain was basically down to his last ten cents in 2008. and ended up coming back. so what s your feeling? it s not pretty. and i think the new hampshire example is really just the most damning. the fact is over that three-week window poli
jeb bush, who at one point was the clear favorite to win the gop presidential nomination, is sitting at just 7% support in national polls behind three candidates who have never held public office as well as marco rubio, who was once bush s protege. it was not supposed to be this way. bush s big advantage coming into this race, the reason that so many tapped him as the eventual nominee, was money. bush, of course, had access to a famous fund-raising network that would allow him to raise a huge amount for his campaign, which the theory went he could then use to bury his competition. and today was the day the campaigns had to release their third quarter fund-raising numbers. we learned bush raised 13.4 million in new donations for his presidential bid. that sounds pretty good. until you consider that bernie sanders, a self-described democratic socialist, raised twice that much in the third quarter and he s far from the only candidate to raise bush. whose fund-raising pace has slowed amids
99.99% of bernie sanders contributors can give again. so here s my question for you as someone who wants to see the system reformed. isn t this evidence it works fine? bernie sanders, here we are q3, bernie sanders is outraising all those people, raising small dollars. why do we need reform? yeah. one success story does not a system successfully reformed make. and i think what we need to look at is the success of public financing, for example, in new york city, where when we have a system that incentivizes these kind of small donors in local? n. state races that s really now where we re seeing money in politics take over and the big donors be able to play an outsize role in for instance north carolina s state government. i think it s great that as you mentioned you organized an event that said if you bring on more people you ll be able to be in this. it s about grassroots organizing. it s about more people becoming part of the process. that s what our democracy is supposed to be abou
time, in july of 2007, what did he do? he went on a book tour. campaign books, especially of those very few presidential candidates who people want to read their books of, and there really aren t many, but ben carson is one of them. he probably sells more books than the rest of all the candidates combined. it s free media. that s how they describe it. we don t need to go out there and pay for stupid ads in new hampshire. we re going to have friendly interviews all over the joint for the next two weeks. so i think it s not really he s suspending his campaign. his campaign will probably be better served by doing in the next two weeks. it also brings to mind, one of the things that popped out to me about ben carson s fund-raising numbers, he raised a lot of numbers, i think it was 20 million, and i think spent 11 million raising that. he was running a direct mail operation that is functionally redistributing money from grassroots conservative donors into the pockets of direct mail consu
to inject their own preferences and opinions and therefore determine public policy outcomes. we need a system where small donors can actually drive a candidate to success, where money and politics is not a barrier. it s terrific that sanders is doing this. we need actual policy reform that create this incentive. and we need to hear from the candidates what they re going to do to demand that kind of change. we should note donald trump raised 3 million in the quarter even though he s self-funding. 3.9 million in the quarter. that was largely small donations. so grassroots support abounds. liz kennedy, thank you very much. my pleasure. still to come, why donald trum. and ben carson are threatening to boycott the next republican debate. that s ahead. [announcer] sunday s your last chance to save big