| Democrats Beat Bush at
Campaign Fundraising;
Second
Quarter Totals for the Democrat Primary Candidates exceed amount Bush
Reported he raised.
Rob Kall OpEdNews.com
Individually, none of the 10 declared and
undeclared democratic presidential primary candidates came close to
matching the money George W. Bush raised-- a reported $30 million. But
add them all up and it looks like they either beat him or came very, very
close.
While all the numbers are not finally tallied
or reported yet, based on estimates from other news sources, particularly
the July 1 Washington Post, combined with our own contacts with the Dean,
Kucinich and Mosely-Braun campaigns, it appears that eight of the nine
declared candidates raised over $30.2 million. Al Sharpton's people could
not be reached and Wesley Clark's draft Clark website says he's raised
$80,000 in addition.
Even if the sum comes up ten percent short,
which appears unlikely, the number is still very impressive, considering
that the Bush promotion team has been touting the size of their numbers.
If nine separate, mostly struggling and underfunded “maybes” can raise
an amount comparable to what Bush raised, then Bush is in for much more of
a fight than he expected. The money raised appears to be supporting polls
which show that Bush against any Democrat only gets 50-52% of the vote.
The biggest success story came from the
Howard Dean campaign, which put on a massive email blitz in the final
hours of the quarter, sending out flurries of emails. And it worked, with
the campaign raising 7.5 million in the second quarter. This massive win
for Dean, passing the rest of the candidates by at least 50% has been
engineered with internet strategies that go far past any of the other
candidates. A study of the other eight candidates websites found a dearth
of internet oriented approaches to building a volunteer netowrk,
communications, fundraising at most of the sites, with nothing but
requests for email addresses at most.
The Dean campaign's success at grassroots
fundraising, with 59,000 people contributing an average of $112 each sets
a new record for candidate primary fund-raising.
This article is based on the estimates
reported in the July 1 Washington post for Gephardt, Graham, Lieberman and
Kerry. We were able to reach the Kucinich campaign where, while they were
not finished counting, they were happy to report that they'd raised over
half a million dollars in the last week alone. Ambassador Mosely Braun's
campaign reported that they'd doubled the funds that were raised in the
first quarter.
Rob Kall rob@opednews.com
is publisher of progressive news and opinion website www.opednews.com and
organizer of cutting edge meetings that bring together world leaders, such
as the Winter Brain Meeting and
the StoryCon
Summit Meeting on the Art, Science and Application of Story. He has also
been co-developer of several software programs, and inventor of one of the
most widely selling biofeedback devices. This article is copyright by Rob Kall, but
permission is granted for reprint in print, email, blog, or web media so
long as this credit is attached
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