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The invisible primary, also known as the money primary, is coming into focus.
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Of the wide slate of Democrats angling to run for the White House in 2020, five presidential hopefuls so far have shared their first-quarter fundraising totals.
The results, which covered the period between Jan. 1 and March 31, are due to be filed by April 15, according to Federal Election Commission rules. But a trickle of President Donald Trump‘s would-be challengers are already posting their results publicly.
The five candidates who have shared their recent campaign totals so far are just as diverse as the broader Democratic field.
Just two of them — Bernie Sanders of Vermont and California’s Kamala Harris — are currently U.S. senators. The others are former House member and Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke, South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg and entrepreneur and free-money advocate, Andrew Yang.
At the bottom end of the fundraising spectrum, Yang said his campaign has raised $1.7 million. Sanders, whose galvanizing 2016 campaign gave eventual Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton an unexpected run for her money, led the pack with a whopping $18.2 million, according to his campaign.
But looks can be deceiving. Not all of the money came in the same time interval for each of the Democrats, nor did it arrive in a steady flow, according to various news outlets.
Buttigieg’s $7 million appears to put him in close contention with O’Rourke for first-quarter fundraising, for instance, but the Indiana mayor also announced his exploratory committee weeks before O’Rourke officially entered the race.
The average daily totals for each candidate, calculated by a Washington Post reporter, tell a different story:
Removing the candidates’ first-day hauls, which are usually their highest-grossing fundraising periods, can perhaps provide a clearer view of how much money came into a campaign on a typical day.
While the Post reported that O’Rourke notched the highest daily average, NBC News showed that Sanders far outpaced him once the day-one figures were removed from the equation.