Mr. Quist has raised more than $2 million, in large part because of liberal online donors — a fact that Mr. Gianforte highlighted on the Thursday call.
“The Democrats have fired up this ActBlue organization,” he said on an audio recording obtained by The New York Times, referring to the online Democratic fund-raising hub. “We’re seeing about $70,000 a day pouring into the state from liberals in San Francisco, New York and Hollywood.”
Asking the lobbyists to give $5,000 each by Friday to “scare off some other Democrat money,” Mr. Gianforte acknowledged that Mr. Quist had far wider support.
“We’ve had over 5,000 individual people support the campaign financially so far,” he said on the recording. “The challenge is my opponent has over 30,000 contributors.”
They're not liberals. They're Berniecrats. The liberals are the DC operatives who grudgingly put recent money into Rob Quist's effort. The Berniecrats are not Bay area, Gotham and Hollywood alone; they are angry nationwide because their own party is dragging its feet to stay money-friendly GOP-lite when it should CHANGE to favor real people with real needs. CHANGE as more than sloganeering. Tom Perez and his ilk in DC could not get 30,000 people energized over anything. They're moribund and proud of it.
And ActBlue is only a money conduit. It is not what is energizing Rob Quist support. First, it is Rob Quist that energizes contributions, and second, it is Quist's past backing of Bernie's candidacy and Bernie's current backing of Quist's. ActBlue is irrelevant to the motivation to help the Quist effort from grassroot people nationwide, beyond being a conduit.