Obama's September Haul Provides Huge Advertising Edge
Amount More Than Doubles Old Record

By Matthew Mosk
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, October 20, 2008

Democratic Sen. Barack Obama announced yesterday that he raised more than $150 million in September, obliterating previous fundraising records and giving him an enormous tactical advantage over Republican Sen. John McCain in the final weeks of the presidential campaign.

With tens of millions more to spend than McCain, Obama has gone on the offensive in dozens of states, including several once considered long shots, such as North Carolina, Virginia and Missouri. He is running three television ads to every one aired by McCain, and he has built a massive operation to reach voters on Election Day.

The campaign has raised so much money that it is considering passing some along to Democratic Party committees to try to help grow the party's majorities in Congress, according to a campaign source.

Obama's September fundraising effort well more than doubled the record of $67 million that he set in August and more than tripled the record set during the 2004 race. The Democrat did it largely by continuing to tap the enthusiasm of novice donors contacted through Web ads and e-mail appeals. The campaign said 632,000 people made their first donation to Obama in September, and the average contribution was less than $100.

The single biggest spike in online giving for the month came when the campaign took in $10 million between convention speeches by Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the GOP's vice presidential pick, and McCain.

Overall, 3.1 million donors have contributed to Obama's campaign, which has raised more than $575 million through the primaries and general-election campaign.

Veteran campaign finance experts called the September effort staggering, noting that Obama raised on average more than $200,000 an hour. "He has just completely changed the scale of presidential fundraising," said Anthony Corrado, who has been writing about presidential fundraising since the mid 1980s.

Unlike Obama, McCain opted to take $84 million in public funding for the general election and to bank on the support of the Republican National Committee, which raised $66 million last month. The Democratic National Committee announced that it raised $50 million in September.

McCain spent $32.3 million of the public funds last month, according to documents filed with the Federal Election Commission, his campaign reported last night. Two-thirds of that amount, $22.6 million, went for advertising.

Obama's decision to become the first presidential candidate in history not to take public money was considered a gamble, especially because it meant being criticized for breaking a pledge to work within the confines of a public financing system born out of Watergate-era reforms.

"I said at the time that I thought McCain would not be particularly disadvantaged by taking public funds," said Bradley Smith, a former Republican appointee to the FEC. "Then Senator Obama goes out and doubles anything that's been seen before. It really is amazing."

The gamble has been paying off for weeks. Instead of having to choose which battleground states to which he will direct resources, as McCain is forced to do, Obama is spending prolifically in all of them.

Instead of reaching out to voters primarily on television, through the mail, and in automated calls, as McCain is doing, Obama is running ads that are popping up in such unconventional spots as Web sites, infomercials and video games.

Instead of running only negative ads during the campaign's final month, as McCain has done, Obama has run not only just as many negative spots, but also more positive ones.

"You see it in the breadth of the ad campaign. You see it in the enormity of the organization. They have not been forced to make resource choices that are typical in a presidential campaign," Corrado said.

Obama's efforts in Florida, where he began airing television ads weeks before McCain, highlight the difference having so much money can make. The head start was a trademark of his primary campaign, but Republicans in the state said Obama was throwing money down the drain in a state he could not win.

"Many people thought it was a head fake, even in the Democratic party," said Mark Gilbert, a top Obama bundler in Florida. "But it's the reason you see the very, very close race there now."

At the same time, Obama is spending in states he has virtually no chance of winning, such as Utah, where Gilbert has a second home.

"They know they're in the reddest of the red states," Gilbert said. "But his supporters are helping by going into western Colorado. They're going into Nevada to help with the ground game there. And the campaign knows that putting some resources there sends the message that Senator Obama wants to be president of all 50 states."

Obama's fundraising effort began taking shape in January 2007, when he first sat down with financial advisers in a rented office suite, three blocks from the Capitol. Obama showed them the thin list of potential donors he had gathered during his 2004 Senate bid and while helping other politicians in 2006. The aides were unimpressed.

The plan they devised involved a novel recipe for fundraising. It would be one part Howard Dean, whose 2004 Democratic primary campaign was the first to harness the power of the Internet to raise cash. And it would be one part Sen. John F. Kerry, the party's 2004 nominee, who built an impressive structure for tapping support from those who could write checks up to the limit of what election laws would allow.

During the primaries, Obama had help from scores of bundlers, many from long-standing Democratic money circles in Hollywood and on Wall Street, and many who joined from his home town of Chicago. But Peter Daou, a key Internet strategist to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's primary bid, said it was the sophistication of Obama's online fundraising effort that set him apart.

"They've taken things we've all used for a couple years now and turned it into a well-oiled machine," Daou said. "They've been creative and innovative along the way, certainly. But this is not just gimmicks. To me they're like the Michael Jordan of fundraising."

Republican National Committee officials have expressed concerns about the potential for abuse with small-dollar fundraising on this scale. They have cited examples of fake names used to donate through the Internet and an example of a foreign contribution, which was returned. The Obama campaign has said it has vetted donations as quickly as possible and would return any questionable contributions.

In June, the Center for Responsive Politics and several other campaign finance groups urged Obama and McCain to publish information about their small donors -- election law does not require campaigns to release information about donors who give less than $200.

Massie Ritsch, a spokesman for the center, said the Obama campaign could have avoided questions about its donations had it responded. At the same time, Ritsch said, there is nothing to suggest that fake or foreign donations are a large-scale problem.

"It's very hard to corrupt the system on a large scale," he said. "The amount of coordination that would be required to corrupt a campaign that's raised more than half a billion dollars is really just impossible."