NEW YORK — Democrat fundraising seems to be going well among the major presidential contenders, especially for Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. She mopped the floor with former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg in Wednesday’s debate in Las Vegas. The $12 million that she has gathered this month ($5 million since this week’s Sin City mash-up) and her post-debate momentum seem to have steered her back onto the radar screen, from which she was slipping.

The small donations that Warren and her rivals are generating (including $2.7 million for Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont since the Vegas face-off) also represent grassroots support — now and in the fall, if any of these contenders gets nominated. People who will donate $25, $50, or $100 most likely will knock on doors, make phone calls, plant yard signs, etc. In this sense, donors equal activists.

When you write your campaign one fat check from your own massive treasure chest, however, that grassroots element is missing.

That said, to paraphrase Bob Dylan: $60 billion doesn’t talk. It screams. Bloomberg could spend $5 billion on his campaign and still have a $55 billion balance — win or lose.

That is a damn good problem to have!

If Bloomberg can bounce back from his debate fiasco, he could remain formidable, especially if the Democrat National Committee keeps changing the rules to benefit him, as it did to get him into the Vegas debate — never mind all of the Left’s rhetoric about trying to squeeze money out of politics, limit the enormous power of billionaires, and all the rest.

A $60 billion bank account goes far. But it also pays to have friends in high places.

Deroy Murdock is a Manhattan-based Fox News Contributor, a contributing editor with National Review Online, and a senior fellow with the London Center for Policy Research.