The latest Presidential election fundraising reports came out Friday. You can view my entire data set here but my digest bullet points are below:
- Obama out-fundraised the entire GOP field bringing in over $32 million in Q2 in actual dollars raised. His take is almost more than all of the top GOP candidates combined but… he spent a massive amount of money to get there. His expenses came in over $80 million bringing his burn rate to 150%!
- 66% of Obama‘s donors were small contributors showing that he still has some online prowess.
- Curiously, his large donor average donation is the lowest in the field at $291.70. Does this indicate that high dollar donors have abandoned Obama or that he has yet to tap into them?
- Romney leads the GOP with a decent $18 million raised in Q2. Impressively his burn rate was only 31% showing a lean and mean operation this time around (compare that to Q2 2007 where his burn rate was over 100%. Mitt continues his focus on large loners with 94% of his donations coming from high dollar donors. He also touts the highest large donor average at $1536.
- Bachmann continues to capatalize on her small donor influence but note that $2 million of her $4 million take came from a committee transfer. Still, she has the lowest burn rate in the race at 12%. I believe she had the shortest time in the Q2 race as well. Looks promising.
- Pawlenty came in right behind Paul but has a 56% burn rate going. He maps closer to Romney’s ratio of large to small donors. He can hang on just fine through Q3 with $2 million cash on hand.
I’ll have more on the other players later on but my key takeaway here: Obama had a spend a boat load of money to get to $32 million.
Fundraising vs. Expenditures:
