Expansion
Multiple other similar events were scheduled for several of the 2008 presidential candidates, generally in coordination with a historical date. Imagery in the November 5 fundraiser drew on the history of the revolutionary Guy Fawkes, the film V for Vendetta, and the traditional rhyme celebrating Fawkes's plot being foiled. Unofficial drives in support of Fred Thompson, Barack Obama, Mike Huckabee, John McCain, and Dennis Kucinich were referred to by the media as moneybombs and seen as attempts to replicate the November 5 event.
Thompson's campaign disavowed his supporters' effort, which was speculated to have failed because it had been scheduled for the day before Thanksgiving and due to lack of realtime donation tracking feedback. Neither the campaign nor the site released contemporaneous fundraising results after the fundraiser. Kucinich's supporters organized a drive on December 15, in honor of the Bill of Rights adoption. Murray Sabrin, New Jersey candidate for U.S. Senate, also repeatedly brought the moneybomb concept to his own race, as well as Jim Forsythe, candidate for New Hampshire's 1st congressional district.
No fundraising drives for any campaign matched the success of the Fawkes bomb until December 16, when the moneybomb on the Boston Tea Party's anniversary, organized entirely by online volunteers, raised an amount estimated as $6.0–$6.6 million ($6 million in approved credit card receipts), from 58,407 individual contributors to Paul's campaign. This broke the November 5 record, as well as the 2004 one-day political fundraising record of John Kerry, indicating it was the largest single-day fundraiser of any kind in U.S. presidential campaign history. Professor Anthony J. Corrado, a campaign finance expert, found the event "extraordinary ... What has done is establish himself as a major candidate, and he's no longer a fringe voice."
The first political money bomb in Canada was organized by Dr. Ryan Meili during his 2009 campaign for the leadership of the Saskatchewan NDP Party. Meili set a goal of raising $10,000 and ended up raising over $12,000 in the week leading up to the leadership convention. Meili asked for donations in multiples of 34 - $3.40, $34, $340 - to reflect his age at the time he was seeking the leadership of the party. After winning the 2012 South Carolina Republican primary Newt Gingrich organized a two-day moneybomb asking supporters to fund a "knockout punch" going into Florida.
Famous quotes containing the word expansion:
“Every expansion of government in business means that government in order to protect itself from the political consequences of its errors and wrongs is driven irresistibly without peace to greater and greater control of the nation’s press and platform. Free speech does not live many hours after free industry and free commerce die.”
—Herbert Hoover (1874–1964)
“Artistic genius is an expansion of monkey imitativeness.”
—W. Winwood Reade (1838–1875)
“The fundamental steps of expansion that will open a person, over time, to the full flowering of his or her individuality are the same for both genders. But men and women are rarely in the same place struggling with the same questions at the same age.”
—Gail Sheehy (20th century)