Bernie Sanders Raises $18 Million in 3 Months, Trailing Buttigieg

WASHINGTON — Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont raised $18 million in the past three months, his presidential campaign said on Tuesday. The total was another display of his strength with small donors, but it also showed that his fund-raising had slowed since he began his campaign.

Mr. Sanders’s fund-raising total for April through June was roughly equal to what he raised in the first six weeks of his presidential bid, in February and March. It was also significantly less than the $24.8 million that Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind., collected in the past three months, an eye-popping sum that the Buttigieg campaign revealed on Monday.

Mr. Sanders was the second candidate to disclose his fund-raising for the second quarter of this year, which ended Sunday. After running for president in 2016, he entered the 2020 race with a huge network of online donors, giving him a built-in advantage over his opponents in collecting small donations.

But Democratic voters have many more candidates to choose from this time around. Mr. Sanders remains far behind former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. in national polling, and he also faces stiff competition from Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts to win over voters on the party’s left flank.

[The Trump campaign and the R.N.C. said they had raised $105 million in the second quarter.]

Like Ms. Warren, Mr. Sanders is counting on small donations from huge numbers of Democrats to power his campaign. He is not holding high-dollar fund-raising events, though last month he held the first grass-roots fund-raiser of his campaign.

Mr. Buttigieg has vacuumed up big donations from donors on the traditional fund-raising circuit, in addition to bringing in money at grass-roots events and collecting online donations.

In the first quarter of the year, Mr. Sanders raised $18.2 million, the most in the Democratic field. In addition to the $18 million in contributions that he collected in the second quarter, he also transferred $6 million to his presidential campaign that he had previously raised, his team said. (Presidential candidates can make use of money they raised in past federal campaigns.)

Mr. Sanders ended the quarter with roughly $30 million in cash on hand, his campaign estimated.

Before the second-quarter deadline on Sunday, the Sanders campaign relentlessly reminded supporters that it was raising money very differently than some of its rivals.

In an email to supporters soliciting donations on Saturday, Mr. Sanders’s campaign manager, Faiz Shakir, wrote that some other Democrats were spending the weekend going from fund-raiser to fund-raiser, “holding expensive hors d’oeuvres with one hand while gobbling up fat checks with the other.”

“Some are going to raise ridiculous amounts of money that way,” he wrote. “Obscene amounts. You’ll see it soon.”

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Another email later Saturday mentioned Mr. Biden, who is relying heavily on big donors, by name. Mr. Biden, who entered the race in late April, is expected to post a big number for the quarter; he suggested at a fund-raiser last month that his campaign had already brought in about $20 million.

The coming fund-raising total for Senator Kamala Harris of California is also expected to be strong, fueled by a combination of traditional fund-raising and online giving. Ms. Harris raised $12 million in the first quarter of the year, more than anyone except Mr. Sanders.

Her campaign said it raised $2 million online in the 24 hours after the start of Thursday’s Democratic debate, when Ms. Harris memorably confronted Mr. Biden over his opposition to school busing, and another $1.2 million online over the weekend.