Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders on Friday simultaneously hit back at The New York Times and jabbed at Hillary Clinton by releasing a statement disclosing the amount of money he's raised for super PACs: $0.
The Sanders campaign showed in a tweet the stark lack of dollars and backed it up with a statement on its website.
BREAKING: Sanders super PAC haul
$0.00
— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) January 29, 2016
"Bernie doesn't want billionaires' money. He doesn't have a super PAC," campaign spokesman Michael Briggs said in a statement. "He believes you can't fix a rigged economy by taking part in the corrupt campaign finance system in which politicians take unlimited sums of money from Wall Street and other powerful special interests and then pretend it doesn't influence them."
Priorities USA Action, the super PAC supporting Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton, announced on Friday that it raised $35 million over several months, massing $5 million in its coffers, The Hill reported.
"We have raised significantly more resources than at this point in 2012, built a team of our Party's strongest leaders and activists, and are developing cutting edge strategies to reach Democratic and undecided voters in every battleground state," Guy Cecil, the group's co-chairman, wrote in the memo.
Also this week, an article in The New York Times suggested that Sanders is benefiting from outside money more than any of his Democratic rivals -- a claim with which Sanders took issue. "The difference is a pretty simple difference," Sanders told reporters on Tuesday. "Hillary Clinton goes out raising money for her own super PAC. I don't have a super PAC, and in the best of all possible worlds, which I hope to bring about, we will get rid of super PACs, we will overturn Citizens United."
In the fourth quarter of 2015, Sanders raised more than $33 million -- only $4 million less than Clinton -- from 2.5 million people, surpassing President Barack Obama's record number of 2.2 million donations in 2011, the Associated Press reported. The average donation was $27, which will allow the campaign to ask contributors to donate again. Only a few hundred gave the $2,700 maximum.
The back-and-forth comes just days before the Iowa caucuses on Feb. 1, in which the two candidates are in a statistical tie by most polls. In recent averages, Clinton is ahead by 2.5 percent support -- 46.8 to 44.3 -- according to averages in the state compiled by RealClear Politics. Martin O'Malley is in a distant third at 4.3 percent support.
