Retired pediatric neurosurgeon and Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson is seeing big success in grass-roots fundraising: $2.6 million since declaring his candidacy on May 4 and more than $6 million since launching his presidential exploratory committee in early March, according to
The Hill.
"I’ve never seen someone go from zero to 60 as fast as he has," said Mike Murray, president and CEO of the marketing firm hired to manage Carson’s small-dollar donations. "I think it’s safe to say that nobody has built a grass-roots following in the past 18 months commensurate to what Dr. Carson has built."
Carson is still a ways from the $50 million that experts estimate candidates will need to get through the GOP primary.
The political neophyte, who was unknown until the 2013 National Prayer Breakfast, says he’s confident he can do it.
"But we’re not worried about that," he said. "We’re just worried about telling the truth and trying to save the country."
Carson has built an email database of more than 500,000 people from whom he has received about $3.3 million via online donations solicited from his website, fundraising emails or Internet ads, The Hill reports.
According to Murray, Carson’s "online engagement metrics" are double the industry standard. Engagement metrics, he said, measure how many people open emails and how long they spend reading them, "watching videos, or perusing his website, and the frequency with which those visits convert into donations."
In addition to online efforts, Carson’s team told
Breitbart earlier this month that the Carson America Exploratory, RBR (Run Ben Run!), and PAC USA First have raised $22 million.
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Fox News poll last week showed that Carson had skyrocketed to the top tier of GOP presidential candidates, receiving the support of 13 percent of primary voters, tying with the presumed front-runner, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush. A month earlier, Carson was at 6 percent. This despite 49 percent of poll respondents saying they had never heard of Carson.
Trailing Bush and Carson in the poll were Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker with 11 percent, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee with 10 percent and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio with 9 percent.
Despite Carson’s grass-roots fundraising successes and popularity within the tea party faction of the GOP, Republican operatives tell The Hill that Carson’s chances are slim.
He is politically inexperienced, they say, and has a "penchant for generating controversial headlines and a political team largely made up of Washington outsiders."
And his fundraising prowess is not even close to Bush, who has yet to formally announce his candidacy.
Last month,
The Washington Post reported that during a gathering in Miami of top donors to his super PAC, Right to Rise, Bush said that in its first 100 days the organization had broken the Republican fundraising record. He did not state a dollar amount, but it is believed that the super PAC would bring in $100 million by the end of May.
Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s campaign has said the former secretary of state is on course to raise $1 billion for her bid.
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