Obama raises record-breaking $86 million
President Obama’s reelection campaign and the Democratic National Committee together raised a whopping $86 million in the second quarter of 2011, campaign manager Jim Messina announced in an early morning online video sent to supporters.
Obama’s re-election campaign collected $47 million, while the president raised another $38 million for the DNC via a joint fundraising committee that allows donors to write a single check that is then divvied up between the two entitites.
The haul far surpasses the goal Messina set for the campaign’s national finance committee of collecting a combined $60 million between April 1 and June 30.
“It’s a monumental achievement,” Messina said.
Obama’s total is more than the $35 million raised this past quarter by all the Republican presidential candidates combined (although Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann has not yet reported her fundraising). The GOP is lagging in fundraising, a problem made more acute by Obama’s success. By this point in 2007, 10 GOP presidential hopefuls had collectively raised more than $118 million. Obama had raised $58.9 million over two quarters.
Details on Obama’s haul won’t be publicly available until Friday, but according to Messina, the average contribution was $69, 98 percent of donors gave less than $250 and more than 552,462 people have contributed to the joint committee.
“We did this from the bottom up,” Messina said. “We didn’t accept one single dollar from Washington lobbyists or special-interest PACs.”
Obama advisers have privately told donors that they hope to raise more than the $750 million raised by the campaign in 2008. The president could well become the first politician to raise over a billion dollars for a campaign.
Despite Obama’s massive fundraising advantage, Messina still argued that the president was the underdog in need of help. “We have reason to be proud of what we’ve built so far, but it’s going to get tougher from here,” he said in the video. “GOP outside spending for 2012 could be as much as $500 million.”
Read more on PostPolitics.com
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