In money race, it’s advantage Democrats
By KENNETH P. VOGEL | 8/24/11 4:30 AM EDT
Republicans seem positively gleeful these days about their prospects headed into 2012, buoyed by a new Gallup Poll showing a handful of Republican presidential hopefuls within striking distance of President Barack Obama as well as some recent predictions that the GOP will hold the House and could take the Senate.
Yet despite all the apparent momentum, the three national party committees tasked with ushering Republicans to victory trail their Democratic counterparts in raising money for 2012, and the disparity is causing some Republicans to fret privately about whether their party committees could dim an otherwise bright outlook.
Even with a slowdown in fundraising during the debt ceiling debate last month, Democratic Party committees have raised $24 million more this year than their Republican counterparts — a money gap more than twice as large as the Democratic advantages at similar points in either of the previous two election cycles.
Through July, according to reports filed last weekend with the Federal Election Commission, the three groups that make up the national GOP’s official infrastructure — the Republican National Committee, the National Republican Congressional Committee and the National Republican Senatorial Committee — had raised a combined $105 million this year.
That compares with the $129 million raised in that same period by their Democratic counterparts – the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.
Raising money is no longer as centralized as it used to be, with fundraising now spread among not only the parties and committees of individual candidates, but also the increasingly prominent independent groups that can take unlimited donations to candidates the party committees cannot.
But the party committees still play a major role, in part because they are allowed to coordinate directly with their candidates’ campaigns, which the independent groups are prohibited from doing.
Most of the Democratic Party committee fundraising superiority — $22 million worth — comes from the DNC’s advantage over the RNC, which is largely the result of Obama’s fundraising prowess. With the debt ceiling debate raging in July, the DNC’s fundraising lagged at least partly because it canceled 10 events that were to have featured the president.
The official Republican Party explanation for the disparity is that the Democrats’ control of the White House gives them a huge campaign cash advantage — that plus the fact that Obama’s fundraising activities significantly outpaced those of the previous five presidents during their first terms.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0811/61955.html#ixzz1Vxk6qWkV
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