Sen. Cory Booker presidential campaign is still afloat, for now at least, after the campaign met a self-imposed fundraising goal of $1.7 million late Sunday evening.
As CNN notes, Booker had said earlier this month that he would call it quits if the campaign didn’t raise sufficient funds to justify his continued candidacy.
Now the Democratic candidate is hoping to raise a few more dollars to top off his funds at $2 million.
“We blew past it last night. It’s been the best sort of period of fundraising we’ve had for the campaign,” Booker said on CNN’s “New Day.” “We still have until midnight tonight. So we’re going to hopefully run through the tape and we hope to actually end this quarter if we can at $2 million raised during this period.”
Although Booker reached his fundraising goal, he is still not quite out of the water yet as he still has not qualified for November’s Democratic primary debate.
Last week, the Democratic National Committee upped the ante in the overcrowded field announcing that candidates would have to meet higher polling and donor thresholds to qualify for the November debate.
Booker has met the donor threshold, which mandates that candidates have to raise money from 165,000 individual donors – including at least 600 donors each in at least 20 states or territories.
However, he has not yet met the polling requirements to qualify for the November election. The DNC announced that in addition to the donor threshold, viable candidates must poll at least 3% in at least four DNC-approved polls of Democratic voters across the nation, or in one of the four early-voting states. There is also the option for candidates to secure at least 5% in two polls of the early-voting states.