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So much for that 2 to 1 fundraising edge Obama supposedly had after Super Tuesday.From The AP:
Democrat Barack Obama raised $7.2 million and rival Hillary Rodham Clinton collected $6.4 million since Super Tuesday, as he continued to resist a Clinton campaign clamoring for attention-getting debates.The remarkable outpouring of contributions recorded since Tuesday's contests in 22 states comes on the heels of an eye-popping $32 million raised by Obama in January and the record-shattering $100 million each Obama and Clinton raised in 2007 in their neck-and-neck race for the Democratic presidential nomination.
For Clinton, this statistic is particularly important:
While not matching Obama's pace, Clinton also saw an online surge of donations from 35,000 new contributors since midnight Tuesday, Clinton campaign aides said.
With a stable of maxed out donors, expanding her donor base was crucial for Clinton.
The overall fundraising number also represents a fairly masterful management of expectations on the Clinton campaign's part. On February 6th the campaign released the surprising information that Clinton had loaned herself $5M in January, which had a dual effect: it made Clinton seem weak, which then motivated her base to pony up. And with a $3M goal for 72 hours, the bar was set rather low so that reaching that amount in 1 day instead of 3 was a sign of unexpected strength, exactly the good news Clinton needed to stem any Obama momentum.
The net result: notice that the above AP article frames the race between Clinton and Obama as "neck and neck," a sentiment echoed on the front pages of today's Wall St. Journal: "Deadlocked Democrats" and The New York Times "Close Race, Democrats Brace For The Long Haul." The reality is that Obama's performance on Tuesday was phenomenal relative to his position just weeks ago but how is it reported?
Again from the Times: "Obama Is Making Inroads, But Fervor Fell Short.
Update [2008-2-7 18:57:3 by Todd Beeton]:Oh, and remember all that talk of Clinton staffers going without pay? Turns out they offered to but never actually did. Again, display weakness so your subsequent strength is all the more surprising.
Update [2008-2-7 19:51:15 by Todd Beeton]:Keep in mind that the 6.4M was actually raised in just over a day, beginning probably late Tuesday night, to Thursday morning when Terry McCauliffe reported the following on a conference call:
Terry McAuliffe, the national chairman for the Clinton campaign, is reporting right now on a conference call with the campaign’s finance committee that the campaign has raised $7.5 million online in the first week February, with about $6.4 million of that in the last 24 or 30 hours.
Raising this kind of money online in such a short time is not supposed to be Clinton's strength. It's amusing to watch Clinton benefit from continued low expectations. Certainly her campaign knows it and is exploiting it brilliantly. Many Obama fans think that all Obama needs to do is campaign somewhere and people who like Hillary Clinton, inevitably portrayed as "low information voters," will come around. It's just this condescending and naive view of Clinton's support around the country that is hurting Obama in the expectations game. As I've written many times (most recently HERE,) Obama supporters underestimate the love out there for Hillary Clinton at their peril.
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