“Given the prodigious amount of money on the Republican side, the Democratic nominee absolutely has to overperform” among small donors, said David Axelrod, who advised Mr. Obama’s two successful presidential campaigns.
.. On the day that Mrs. Clinton sent out emails in April announcing her presidential bid, a campaign official said, many of the messages bounced back. Fewer than 100,000 of the 2.5 million email addresses collected during her 2008 campaign, it turned out, were still active.
.. Mrs. Clinton’s campaign has responded with a new program, the Hillbuilder Initiative, intended to build a more robust online presence and harvest the grass-roots money and enthusiasm that can come with it.
.. Mrs. Clinton’s campaign has taken in three times more money than any of her Democratic or Republican rivals, according to Federal Election Commission data filed by the 2016 candidates on Wednesday.
But super PACs and other outside groups set up by allies or former aides to the Republican candidates have dwarfed the top Democratic super PAC — as well as most of the Republican campaigns — collectively raising in excess of $200 million and startling some in Mrs. Clinton’s camp.
The reports showed, for instance, that Jeb Bush has relied largely on wealthy donors giving the maximum contribution — attracting far less financial support from more modest donors — and that Rick Perry, Ben Carson and Rick Santorum are burning through the money they have raised much more quickly than most of their opponents.
Hillary Rodham Clinton raised the most money for the primary of any candidate, $46.7 million, while Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, running against Mrs. Clinton for the Democratic nomination, brought in $15 million, the vast majority of it from donors giving $200 or less.
.. Without super PACs, four Republicans — Mr. Bush, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and Mr. Carson — would have raised roughly the same amount of money, $10 million to $12 million in the second quarter of 2015
.. Instead, the field has rapidly separated into three financial tiers. Mr. Bush has raised about $114 million with the help of a super PAC. Mr. Cruz, Mr. Rubio and their super PACs occupy the next-highest tier, with each having raised more than $40 million.
For the past several summers, Bill and Hillary Clinton have done what New York City’s moneyed residents have done for decades: They spent their vacation amid the prime beachside real estate of Long Island.
In 2011 and 2012, there was the eight-bedroom, 12,000-square-foot East Hampton rental with a heated pool that the couple took for part of August, the kind of house that typically goes for $200,000 per month, according to local real estate listings.
.. Donors who did not want to talk on the record offering Mrs. Clinton unsolicited advice said they hoped she could avoid the inevitable claims of elitism by not renting a Hamptons home again, given the optics of a presidential campaign and the still-sluggish economy.
.. At the same time, Mrs. Clinton and her allies, under intense pressure to raise money for both her campaign and Priorities USA Action, a super PAC supporting her bid, will need to woo the country’s wealthiest Democrats this summer, wherever the 0.001 percent happen to be.
For three election cycles, American Crossroads, the brainchild of Karl Rove and other leading Republican strategists, has been among the most powerful forces in national politics, a shadow party that has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising, data and opposition research to help elect candidates.
.. The nonprofit arm of Crossroads is facing an Internal Revenue Service review that could eviscerate its fund-raising. Data projects nurtured by Mr. Rove are being supplanted in Republican circles by a more successful initiative funded by the Koch political network, which has leapfrogged the Crossroads organizations in size and reach.
.. But Crossroads officials say that there is no threat to their fund-raising base, predicting that many donors will be willing to write two large checks — one to them and another to committees tied to a particular candidate. In 2014, Crossroads, despite a slow start, raised more than $100 million by November.