Kerry raises $40m in quarter
Democrat John F. Kerry's campaign is expected to announce today that it raised more than $40 million in the first quarter of 2004, roughly keeping pace with the Bush-Cheney money juggernaut.
President Bush entered the spring with a commanding financial advantage, but the fund-raising boost gives Kerry the ability to counter a wave of Republican ads in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and other swing states in what is already an all-out fight for the White House.
Kerry spokesman Michael Meehan said the campaign plans to announce that a surge in online donations in March will push the Massachusetts senator's take for the first three months of the year "for sure over $40 million; the question is how much."
Twenty-one trays of checks were still being counted yesterday, Meehan said.
The turnaround in Kerry's financial fortune comes just a month after the senator emerged from a hard-fought race for the party's nomination with little money left to spend, and about three months after Kerry mortgaged his Beacon Hill town house so that he could make a personal loan of $6.4 million to keep his campaign afloat.
The Kerry take would set a quarterly record for a nonincumbent, breaking the mark of about $30 million set by George W. Bush, then governor of Texas, in 2000, Meehan said. It would also put the Democrat more than halfway to his $80 million fund-raising goal for the general election campaign.
Another Kerry adviser said the response from contributors has been so strong that the goal will be now be pushed to well over $100 million.
In March alone, Kerry raised about $26 million over the Internet, according to this campaign official, soaring past what at the time were considered astounding benchmarks set last year by Kerry's former Democratic rival, Howard Dean. Only recently has Kerry resumed a schedule of fund-raising events.
The Kerry and Bush campaigns are not required to file their next official fund-raising reports at the Federal Election Commission until April 20. A Kerry adviser said the Democrat had more than $20 million on hand as of April 1. An estimate from the Bush campaign was not available, though Bush's advantage was probably three to four times that amount.
A Bush-Cheney spokesman said final totals were not yet tallied late yesterday but that the incumbents' campaign, like Kerry's, would report collecting more than $40 million for the quarter. Bush-Cheney took in a total of $26.5 million in January and February and announced receipts of $11.375 million at fund-raising events in March, the spokesman said on the condition of anonymity.
Contributions from mail and telephone solicitations will push that figure considerably higher, the spokesman said, noting that in February the campaign collected $7.3 million from those types of solicitations. Moreover, as of March 30, the campaign had eclipsed its $170 million goal for the entire campaign, he said.
That kind of fund-raising still gives Bush a big advantage over Kerry.
Through last December, the Bush campaign had raised $130 million and started 2004 with $99 million in the bank. Kerry, by contrast, as late as March 1, had $2.4 million on hand, the day before he effectively locked up his party's nomination on Super Tuesday.
Since then, the Bush campaign has spent more than $20 million on television advertisements in 17 potential swing states in November. Through March 28, Bush-Cheney had outspent Kerry by $20.45 million to $3.45 million on television, according to data compiled by the TNS Media Intelligence/Campaign Media Analysis Group. For the most recent week, Bush had outspent Kerry by $5.4 million to $1.5 million, CNN's "Morning Grind" reported this week.
The Bush-Cheney blitz may have been a factor in reversing Kerry's early lead in polls taken in some of these states.
The Bush advantage on the airwaves has been somewhat offset by ads aired by heavy-spending Democratic advocacy groups, known as 527s (named for the section of the Internal Revenue Service code under which they were created), that can collect unrestricted amounts from wealthy donors.
The Republican National Committee and Bush-Cheney campaign filed a complaint this week with the FEC alleging that the Kerry campaign was illegally coordinating expenditures with the 527s. The 527s and the Kerry campaign denied the charge.
Both candidates declined public matching funds for the nomination process, thus avoiding spending limits on their campaigns up to the nomination. However, both the Bush and Kerry campaigns have said they will accept public funding for the general election cycle. That will limit their spending to $74,692,000 in that period, according to Ian Stirton, spokesman for the FEC.
Both will receive the funds upon their official nomination at party conventions this summer. 