The Fix: Let us help you get a sense of what early presidential fundraising looks like

By Philip Bump March 6 at 9:46 AM

Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton have something in common besides the fact that their last names have appeared on presidential ballots before. Each hopes to be able to announce a massive fundraising haul when launching their campaigns. Bush, early (and quickly walked-back) rumors suggested, wants to lay out $100 million in the first three months, the sort of figure that could make his troubles in Iowa go down a bit more smoothly.

Our Chris Cillizza looked at this on Thursday, pulling data from past prior-year fundraising to look at how the environment has changed. According to the FEC, five of the biggest prior-year fundraising quarters occurred in the first quarter of 2007. Hillary Clinton raised the most at that point, bringing in $36 million. Then Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani, and John Edwards.

To make that haul a bit more concrete, we decided to break the fundraising down by the second. So if you took Clinton's $36 million and assumed it came in evenly over the three months from January to March 2007, and then you started counting those dollar bills from the moment you, gentle reader, opened this page, it would look something like the table below.

But that was for candidates in 2008. Two open fields, competing in a pre-Citizens United environment. By 2012, as Cillizza notes, fundraising had shifted away from candidates to external PACs -- exactly the way in which Bush is gathering money now. There are advantages to that; the constraints on contributions aren't the same.

If Bush were to hit the $100 million mark -- which he says he won't, and which would be stunning -- it would mean that, since you opened the page, his fundraising has looked like this:

$100 million would mean $13 coming in every second of every minute of every day for 90 straight days -- nine months before voting even starts. To pull in the median household income of a family in Iowa, it would take about 11 hours. All before he's even a candidate for president.

Philip Bump writes about politics for The Fix. He is based in New York City.