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This is not an election where we hand out gifts. It is an election where we ask everyone to contribute more.

We are seeing at the Republican National Committee a phenomenon that is worth noting this week; maybe today, maybe tomorrow, maybe Wednesday, we will have a million first time donors since the president took office.

I contribute to public candidate campaigns, and there's a federal limit on how much you can contribute to each individual candidate. I obey the law in that regard, and I feel like I'm doing it properly.

One of the problems with a candidate like Bob Kennedy, and his brother before him, was that people assumed they didn't need contributions.

I think what should be celebrated about our campaign is we have over 3 million people who have contributed to our campaign - teachers, firefighters, nurses, retirees. They're making up the backbone of this field organization in the country.

If you create a system that makes the small donors the linchpin of the system in terms of how members of Congress directly raise the funds for their campaigns, then it gives everyday citizens much more of a role - a leveraging role - in the funding of those campaigns.

People have their constitutional right to contribute to a campaign and if they have discretionary money that they want to contribute to a candidate, whether a Republican or a Democrat, they should be able to do so.

What we have now is a situation where politicians get a whole bunch of money from mainly business interests. Then once they hold that office, they spend all their time in office paying back over and over again those campaign contributions through various favors and contracts and that sort of thing.

It is essential that there should not only be a limit on campaign spending but it should be required to say where that money is spent and how it is spent. I think there has been more abuse in campaign spending, actually, than in campaign contributors.

People who are disenfranchised politically and people who are poor often don't vote. They often don't elect politicians, so the politicians who are supporting them are really being very charitable, because they're not going to give them billions of dollars in campaign funds.