MANCHESTER, N.H. — New Hampshire primary events are in full swing, but Democratic presidential candidate Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders is already looking ahead to Super Tuesday.
On Thursday, the Sanders campaign announced it will ramp up staffing and ad spending in Super Tuesday states following a $25 million fundraising haul in January.
The campaign says it will put $5.5 million towards television and digital advertising in eight new states—Arkansas, Colorado, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Utah—and will expand investments already made in Texas and California.
Missing from that list is Maine, which is included in Super Tuesday on March 3. But, that's only because Sanders has already been focusing on Maine.
Sanders won the 2016 Maine primary against Hillary Clinton, 64.3% to 35.5%. In order to win again in 2020, Rosemary Boeglin, the Northeast Press Secretary for the Sanders campaign, says Maine is one of the first Super Tuesday states to have full-time, on-the-ground campaign staff.
Ad money has also been poured into N.H. considering the primary, and there is some crossover there since Maine shares a border, Boeglin says.
Boeglin says the Sanders campaign has raised approximately $720,000 from more than 10,000 Mainers in 2019.
The campaign says Sanders’ January was his best fundraising month to date, with more than 1.3 million donations from more than 648,000 people, and 219,000 new donors gave in January. The average donation was $18.72.
Since Sanders launched his campaign in February of 2019, he’s raised $121 million; he spent $50 million during the final three months of 2019 and finished the year with $18.2 million in cash on hand.
