2012 Presidential Candidate Fund Raising and Spending

Much focus is put on how much money a candidate raises in a campaign. Fund raising is a key to the popularity and backing of a candidate, but their ability to effectively spend those funds is also key.

Obama has raised the most by far thanks to a large network of bundlers (unions, political action committees, etc). The president has raised more than $46 million and has $34 million in cash remaining for his campaign to use.

The closest GOP candidate is Mitt Romney. The former Massachusetts governor has raised over $18 million and spent about $6 million so far.

As of yesterday, Pawlenty and Paul were tied at about $4.5 million raised with Bachmann close behind with a Q2 finishing total of $4.2 million in fund raising. Cain and Gingrich bring up the rear of the viable candidates with $2.6 and $2.1 million in funds. The other candidates have raised less than $1 million dollars each.

Of the non-Romeny candidates, spending is varied. Ron Paul has almost $3 million remaining to spend on the election, Pawlenty has $1.5 million remaining that he can use for the primary, Bachmann has almost $3.4 million and Cain has less than half a million dollars remaining to spend.

Of the leading fund raisers, Cain is in the most precarious position. He has spent heavily and has achieved the name recognition he was looking for. 48% of GOP voters now know who Herman Cain is. Unfortunately, he is still sitting low in the polls despite his new found visibility and has little money left to get his message out. Cain’s campaign has stalled and may have trouble getting reignited.

Pawlenty is in a comfortable, but not enviable position. With $1.5 million in the bank for the primary, his $2 million spend hasn’t gotten him a favorable position in the polls. Sitting well behind Romney and Bachmann, Pawlenty will need to focus his remaining funds to excite voters before February.

Ron Paul is stuck low in the polls with the other also-running candidates. He deserves mention because his fund-raising machine has put him in the running if he can spend it well. He has more than $3 million left to spend, has name recognition and plenty of time. His funds

The front-runners in recent polls are Romney and Bachmann with Rep. Bachmann gaining ground on the former Governor. Romney has almost four times the roughly $3.4 million that Michele is holding. Romney has been spending much faster than Bachmann and may have to continue doing so to deal with the tarnished image that “RomneyCare” has given him among Conservatives.

Rick Perry and Sarah Palin could both change the arithmetic, but for now, it seems to be a race between Romney and Bachmann – liberal Republican vs. Conservative Republican.

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Rich Mitchell

Rich Mitchell is the editor-in-chief of Conservative Daily News and the president of Bald Eagle Media, LLC. His posts may contain opinions that are his own and are not necessarily shared by Bald Eagle Media, CDN, staff or .. much of anyone else. Find him on twitter, facebook and

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One Comment

  1. Obama was found to be receiving money from Arab groups who were sending money in on the internet. Unfortunately like many things that people abuse, they eventually end up being taken away as a means to do something unique. Obama announced that he was not going to take anymore contributions from people by credit card. That was backing out of a promise he made when he first started his campaign that he wasn’t going to take contributions any other way but from all the mom and pops around the country. But when George Soros took his campaign financing over Obama changed his mind and started using the internet for all his contributions.

    What this actually did was hide where his contributions were coming from. This is one reason why Obama wants to take over the internet with this bogus program called “neutrality” over the internet usage so that everyone can be getting an equal amount of information without that info being over ridden by any one ideology. What bull! What he really wanted to do is control the flow of money coming in on the internet so that we couldn’t do what he did that hid where his money was coming from. Much of Obama’s money came from overseas but since you can’t trace where information is coming from and going to because it moves so fast, he believed his sources couldn’t be tracked, but they could. A lot of his campaign money came from terror groups from the Middle East. There just wasn’t any physical way he could make some of these large amounts of money so fast other than over the internet banking services. It’s not like one person writing in their bank account number and then the amount was transfered to Obama’s campaignaccount. This money came into a central hub of banks and out of the country, and then into his account. He could show millions in a few minutes if there were enough banks contributing all at once. Well, there’s no way enough people could send their infomation into his campaign offices that fast unless it was from all these overseas hubs set up by terror networks. That’s the way they transfer their money so that units in foreign countries could get money fast from groups all over the Middle East and Europe really fast.

    The Republican’s are trying to do this themselves right here in the U.S. for contributions to their candidates campaign funds.

  2. Obama’s foreign contributors Part II

    The Republican’s aren’t using the internet to get contributions from foreign sources like the criminal Democrats, they want to be able to get campaign contributions more efficiently, like the Democrats do utilizing modern electronic systems and devices. For to long the Republican’s haven’t been to tech savy, but they are changing that quickly so that they can hit the ground running for getting funds to the candidates fast so that if Democrats make accusations the Republican’s can refute them quickly and blanket more areas than the Democrats. That’s how Democrats have beat Republican’s in the past and that is the Republican’s haven’t been able to counter accusations fast enough to change people’s minds and show the lies before the people forgot about the accusation. You know how the Democrats will just change the subject when they are caught lying, well they won’t be able to change fast enough this time. They will be caught. Republican’s and conservatives are using the internet now to counter every single accusation the leftists are using to try to trick the American’ people. They aren’t getting away with it so fast as they used to and it’s starting to show up big time.

    This is going to be an information war and we’re not going to be left in the dust this time. We’re getting our game face on and now rather than later when it’s to late.

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