I am interested in the fundraising expectations game because I want this field to clear down to the top two or the top three candidates before Valentines' Day so that constructive work can occur. I have done
matching funds projections, and occassionally looked at different
candidates' goals and realities.
However the data has not been exhaustive or complete. Fortunately, via
Blog For America I saw this
Knight Ridder article which does a great job of looking at where the candidates and their campaigns are. The information is not pretty.
First we are seeing that both Gephardt and Lieberman have asked that their staffers to rearrange or reduce their January paychecks. This is an indication of a money crunch in these campaigns. We have the old news of John Kerry loaning himself $850,000 as he waits for a $5 million dollar mortage to fund his campaign through February 3, 2004. The article is quoting Andy Smith, director of the University of New Hampshire Service Center, as saying that these campaigns are suffering from big donor dry-up as the disclosable donors are either shifting their support to Dean or Clark or holding their money tight until they can get on a winner's bandwagon.
John Edward's campaign is claiming that they are "doing well" and "able to meet their plan" of raising $20 million for the year. I have extremely severe doubts about this claim as he had only raised $14.5 million by the end of the third quarter and his pace has been declining since last January.
Now the surprising thing is that the Kucinich campaign states that it has already raised at least $1.1 million dollars for this quarter. He is on pace to meet Kerry's fundraising goals. Sharpton and Braun are asteriks in the fundraising game.
Clark's campaign is projecting 10-12 million, so I think that has become the honest CW for his expectation and I think that Mark Kleiman will be wrong in his prediction that Clark will outraise Dean. Dean's campaign is projecting "another successful quarter." I really do not know what that means, but looking at the three quarters of this year, Dean's fundraising has practically doubled each quarter, so is successful 30 million, 20 million or 15 million? Who knows?
Meanwhile the miserable failure will still be drawing in 170-200 million dollars to run unopposed in his primary.