By Matthew Mosk and Perry Bacon Jr.
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, September 30, 2007; A05

When former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney closes the books on his latest campaign finance report today, it will reveal a slow but steady shift from a candidacy built on thousands of individual donations to one relying increasingly on his own personal fortune.

Top Romney advisers said last week that they expected his campaign to raise almost $40 million in the first nine of months this year. And though they have not released a firm figure, they expected that Romney will have supplemented those contributions with nearly $15 million of his own money.

Romney's candidacy has quietly morphed into one of the nation's first hybrid campaigns for a major-party presidential nomination: one that is neither a traditional bid built on individual donations nor a self-funded effort such as those launched by billionaires Steve Forbes and Ross Perot.

"Romney is something different," said Jennifer A. Steen, a Boston College professor who has written a book on self-financed candidates.

That Romney is spending some of his personal fortune, estimated to be between $190 million and $250 million, in part reflects a decline in donations to his campaign. He led all of the GOP contenders in fundraising during the first three months of the year. But he relied in large part on maximum donations from business allies in Massachusetts, where he ran the venture capital company Bain Capital Partners, as well as from fellow Mormons in Utah, where Romney managed the 2002 Winter Olympics. His donations from those two states fell sharply between April and June.

Romney's personal money has helped him avoid the plight of another White House contender, Sen. John McCain, who found himself laying off staff in July while Romney was able to air ads in key primary states. His spending is a more dramatic and expansive version of what then-candidate John F. Kerry did in December 2003, when the Democratic senator from Massachusetts lent his campaign more than $6 million in a last-ditch effort that helped him win the Iowa caucuses.

Romney launched his campaign with a showy Jan. 8 event at the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center, placing 400 of his biggest supporters in front of phones and asking them to devote the day to raising money from friends and contacts around the country. The event yielded $6.5 million, a huge haul for a single day's effort.

Ron Kaufman, a top Romney adviser who attended the event, said it sent a powerful message to potential supporters who might have wondered whether Romney would simply run on his personal fortune.

"As self-funding, big-spending candidates have proven, it doesn't get you anything," Kaufman said. "The bottom line is: The way to be a candidate for president is prove you can put the organization together, prove to the voters that you've earned the right to be a serious candidate for president. You've got to earn it; you can't buy it."

After that event, Romney punctuated that message, telling reporters that it would be "akin to a nightmare" if he were forced to contribute much of his own money to his presidential effort.

By the end of the first fundraising quarter, which closed on March 31, he had posted a headline-grabbing $21 million total, helping to vault him into the top tier of candidates seeking the GOP nomination.

That figure was critical to establishing Romney as a viable candidate. As almost an afterthought, the campaign revealed that the candidate had also put $2.4 million into his campaign account. When asked about it by a Boston Globe reporter, an aide stressed that the money was a loan to the campaign, not a gift.

Over the next three months, the balance between the money Romney raised from contributors and the money he drew from his own accounts began to shift. His fundraising haul dropped to $14 million, compared with the $17 million total of one of his top rivals, former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and the more than $32 million taken in by Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.). But Romney also lent himself an additional $6.5 million.

At a news conference, he signaled that his message about the role his bank accounts would play had shifted. "It would be nice not to have to loan or contribute to your own campaign, but the reality is, if you want to have a strong campaign that gets out there and can talk across the nation, you're going to have to do what's necessary," he told reporters.

Kevin Madden, a campaign spokesman, said Romney's top advisers carefully weighed the political implications of turning to the candidate's own money for help. What they determined, he said, was that the investments the campaign was making in early television ads were yielding a return, and that the campaign appeared to be blossoming.

"In order to maintain the campaign's growth, we needed to have the resources," Madden said. "The decision was to match that growth with his own personal contribution, so this campaign would not be short of resources, so we would remain competitive and grow into a national organization."

The campaign also faced a significant challenge that was not confronting Romney's chief Republican rivals, Giuliani, McCain and former senator Fred D. Thompson of Tennessee: Romney is much less well-known around the country.

Romney "invested" -- the term his campaign likes to use to describe the use of his personal resources -- significant sums in paid advertisements, far outpacing the other candidates by devoting more than $6 million to television spots, according to Evan Tracey of the Campaign Media Analysis Group. He also poured money into Iowa, assembling an operation for the state's straw poll that included a statewide corps of 60 "super-volunteers," who were paid between $500 and $1,000 per month to talk up his candidacy; a fleet of buses; a direct-mail campaign; and a straw poll consultant who was paid nearly $200,000.

The truth is, Steen said, even without the early fundraising effort, Romney may not have faced a huge backlash even if he had used significant amounts of his own money from the start. A recent Gallup poll showed that 92 percent of the public find it "acceptable" for presidential candidates to use their own money to pay their campaign costs.

"What I found, if you look at public opinion polls, the public doesn't tend to care," Steen said.

A recent Gallup poll showed 92 percent of the public find it "acceptable" for presidential candidates to use their own savings to pay their campaign costs.

Romney's aides have signaled that he will report putting in about $6 million more of his own money over the past three months, and there are reasons for this. Romney's poll numbers in New Hampshire are slipping; and with him still running fourth among the leading GOP contenders in national surveys, his campaign sent out a memo both to reassure supporters and to lower their expectations.

And as Romney prepared to release his third-quarter numbers this week, he began hinting that he will be using even more of his own money. He presented at an event in California a new rationale for doing this -- far from the "nightmare" he had described earlier -- telling supporters that, by dipping into his pocket, he would not be "beholden to any particular group for getting me into this race or for getting me elected."

Staff researcher Madonna Lebling contributed to this report.