Thursday, June 5, 2008

The GOP is ass-in-the-air scared of Obama's fundraising prowess

With Hillary calling it a day and suspending her campaign, the reality of the Obama phenomenon is causing heartburn for a new group of campaign advisers...John McCain's finance team. A look at the campaign finance data doesn't offer up a single bit of good news for team Mc$ame, and hopes that they can compete with Obama's ability to rake in the bucks are nonexistent.

Just look at the numbers, they don't lie. Through April Obama raised $272 million, and now he is reaching out to the Clinton donors who raised over $200 million in the same time frame.

Obama has over 1.5 million donors, and combining the donor lists of the two main Democratic rivals for the nomination yields a donor base of over 2.5 million donors (and a huge pool of campaign volunteers).

This huge financial advantage will allow Obama to compete in states that are considered "reliably red" in most election cycles. This will force McCain to spend his precious and limited resources to beat back attacks in friendly territory.
In the general election, Obama could afford to set up large operations in Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, New Mexico and a host of other states – maybe even McCain’s own Arizona..

That would force McCain to pick the mid-size state battles he could afford while also trying to hold off a free-spending Obama in such essential big states as Ohio, Missouri and Florida.

“McCain has to make every dollar count in the general election and Obama will have money to burn,” said Evan Tracey, co-founder of Campaign Media Analysis Group.
And the cherry on top of this sundae of republican misery?

Mc$ame is a spectacularly lousy fundraiser. April was his best fundraising month, taking in a mere $18 million, and that was the month he secured the nomination. By contrast, the month Kerry secured the nomination in 2004, he took in $44 million. “What’s been striking about the McCain money is that there hasn’t been any big surge,” says Anthony Corrado, an expert on campaign finance. “There are no big spikes; there is slow growth.”

Meanwhile, I just wrote my first check to the Obama campaign. It goes out in the mail in couple of hours.

~~BG

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