Soros, who backed Barack Obama in 2008 and has made some of the largest gifts to liberal causes this century, cut the $6 million check to Priorities USA, her top super PAC, on December 17, dipping his feet fully into the Clinton effort as she tries to beat back a surprisingly strong challenge from Bernie Sanders.
Sanders, for his part, raised more than $20 million in January, his campaign announced Sunday. Sanders campaign says its January haul, which will not be reported on Sunday's filing, came from more than 777,000 individual contributions.
All campaigns and super PACs must file their 2015 reports with the Federal Election Commission by the end of Sunday. Some are in good shape and will hype their numbers, especially their cash-on-hand heading into the month, in order to instill donor confidence in their campaign's ability to go the distance.
Sunday is also the first chance in six months to see what how much big donors like Soros are giving to super PACs, the outside groups that can raise and spend unlimited amounts of cash to help candidates.
Priorities USA said Friday it has raised $50 million through this month, with another $42 million in pledges. Clinton's campaign also announced it had $38 million on hand as of the end of the year.
Two other groups supporting Clinton, American Bridge and Correct the Record, brought in an additional $6 million total.
And while Sanders has sworn off super PACs, a group run by National Nurses United is backing the Vermont senator regardless and has raised $2.3 million, with about half of that remaining, the group reported.
Billionaires backing Marco Rubio
The best funded group of all, as of Sunday early afternoon, is Marco Rubio's super PAC, which raised nearly $16 million in the second half of 2015 and had about $14 million on hand.
Rubio in recent months has successfully courted some of the GOP's leading financiers, and it is showing.
Several individuals gave $1 million to the group, including Norman Braman, a Rubio mentor from Florida who has now given a total of $6 million to the super PAC.
And two new billionaire donors to Rubio's circle, Paul Singer and Ken Griffin, each gave $2.5 million.
Republican super PACs
The super PACs supporting Ben Carson and Rand Paul are poor, while the outside groups supporting Chris Christie and Ted Cruz are relatively rich, new campaign finance filings show.
Carson's main super PAC, The 2016 Committee, raised $6.1 million in the second half of 2016, but spent nearly all its money and retained only $560,000 as of December 31. And Rand Paul's authorized group, America's Liberty PAC, has been beset by scandal -- its top two operatives were once indicted -- and now has poor fundraising results: it only collected $1.4 million, with only about $830,000 on hand.
Other groups are in a stronger position: John Kasich's two super PACs, brought in over $3.6 million -- much of which through smaller, five-digit checks -- and had under $2 million remaining. Christie's group, America Leads, raised $5.1 million thanks to prominent hedge-funder Steve Cohen, who sank another $2 million to the super PAC. It still had $3.3 million on hand.
Stand for Truth, a mysterious pro-Cruz super PAC that formed only recently, revealed its donors on Sunday -- nearly half of the money raised by it came from the family of Adam Ross, a close Cruz friend from Texas. It still had $2.1 million in the bank.
All three of those groups, however, have spent much of their cash on television ads over the last month, which the reports would not capture.
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