Re-raising Hill

On February 21, 2007, when the words “presumptive nominee” often preceded Hillary Clinton’s name, two of her most influential fund-raisers, former DNC finance chair Maureen White and Steven Rattner, held a dinner party in their palatial Fifth Avenue apartment for the top donors to the different Democratic presidential candidates.

The idea, according to one attendee who backed Barack Obama, was to make sure that no matter how tense or ugly the primary became, the bundlers of the different tribes would always keep friendly, open channels. Howard Dean, the chair of the Democratic National Committee, sat among them as the personification of party unity.

“About halfway through, it became obvious that wasn’t going anywhere,” said the Obama bundler, who said that Mrs. Clinton’s supporters seemed particularly emphatic and emotional in promoting their candidate. “That was the last meeting.”

Now, a year later, the cocktail tables have turned. Mr. Obama’s potential nomination holds the prospect of unpleasant consequences for the New York-heavy group of elite super-donors that for years has financed the Clinton family and occupied a lofty perch in Democratic politics.

Not everyone in Democratic fund-raising circles is broken up about the possibility.

“It is like a shifting of a power center from New York to Chicago,” said Michael Bauer, a Chicago-based bundler for Mr. Obama.

He said he had no doubt that donors who backed Mr. Obama early would enjoy more influence in the general election campaign and beyond than the Clinton money people. “Barack is smart enough that they will have a seat at the table,” he said. “The question is how prime a seat will they have.”

Add Mr. Obama’s unprecedented ability to raise money online, and there is a palpable concern among some of Mrs. Clinton’s “Hillraisers”—the campaign’s designation for bundlers of more than $100,000 in donations—that their access is about to be cut off.

Robert Zimmerman, a Democratic National Committeeman and a supporter of Mrs. Clinton, said in an interview the day before the March 4 primaries that he remains confident in Hillary Clinton’s candidacy, but acknowledged having been approached by some nervous donors half-jokingly asking, “Are we going to be able to get a hotel room? Are we going to have to stay with the New York delegation?”

(Mr. Zimmerman said he responds reassuringly that “they should be honored to stay with the New York delegation.”)

If Mrs. Clinton loses, there may be more meaningful consequences than subpar hotel accommodations for these donors, some of whom have invested 16 years of effort and millions of dollars in bundled checks in the Clinton franchise.

“For a variety of reasons, their influence is greatly diminished,” said a Democratic operative with close ties to the national party. “There’s the rise of small donors—and a lack of reliance on those large bundlers in particular. And there’s a bunch of new folks who have been energized.”

“For everything from cabinet appointments to invitations to state dinners to presidential cuff links, they’re going to the back of the line, and it’s going to take an awful lot to get back to the front.”

In front of them, among many others, will be longtime Chicago loyalists like investment banker Lou Susman, Obama finance chair Penny Pritzker, and private-equity investor Orin Kramer, the most notable New York-area bundler to have taken a chance on the Obama campaign.

In a recent interview, Mr. Kramer described bundlers like him as some dominant species from a political Cretaceous Period.

“If you said, ‘Orin, what’s happening here that most affects money flow has nothing to do with anything you do,’ I would say, ‘That’s correct,’” he said.

“These really are my friends, but you basically say, ‘Well, if I went out and raised $200,000, you’d say, gee, that’s really nice.’ It is not a material number relative to what Barack Obama raises a day,” he said. “If I come in with a new $200,000 this morning, you’d say, ‘Great: you’re the biggest guy in the country, but the truth is we have raised $200,000 in the morning from people you have never met.’”

None of this is to say that Mrs. Clinton’s most influential donors, who still say publicly that she can win, won’t be able to help if she doesn’t get the nomination.

They point out, correctly, that no candidate they have ever encountered refused a legitimately gathered check, and they dismiss as absurd the notion that New York would ever lose its primacy in Democratic fund-raising, no matter how much Mr. Obama raised online.

Clinton finance chair Hassan Nemazee said that if Mr. Obama turned out to be the winner, well-known New York donors who had decided to back Mr. Obama early on “will have and should have a greater presence and greater voice than those of us who backed an alternative candidate”