Campaigns need votes to win. But they need money simply to survive. They get that money from a vanishingly small percentage of Americans.
According to Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig, only 0.26 percent of Americans give more than $200 to congressional campaigns. Only 0.05 percent give the maximum amount to any congressional candidate. Only 0.01 percent — 1 percent of 1 percent — give more than $10,000 in an election cycle. And in the current presidential election, 0.000063 percent of Americans — fewer than 200 of the country's 310 million residents — have contributed 80 percent of all super-PAC donations.
