This post over on The Democratic Strategist analyzes the campaigns’ relative financial states in a bit more detail. While Obama is on track to far out-raise McCain’s federal election grant, the RNC can obviously continue to fundraise and so far has much more cash on hand than does the DNC. Matt Compton says that despite the current figures, Obama’s still okay:
First, we shouldn’t assume that Obama’s fundraising is going to peak in August — far from it. In fact, we already have some indication of how this new month is going to look for the campaign. The day after Sarah Palin spoke at the Republican National Convention, the Obama camp announced that it had raised $10 million in 24 hours. Today we learned that the campaign raised $11 million at a posh fundraiser in California in the span of a couple of hours last night. A big chunk of that Hollywood money is going into the coffers of the DNC, but at this point, that hardly matters. Even for the Obama campaign $21 million dollars in just two days is astounding. And I’m absolutely positive that the September 26th debate in Oxford, Mississippi will be another jaw-dropping night for fundraising.
Second, part of the reason the McCain camp was able to take the federal money is because the campaign is choosing to outsource its ground operation to the Republican National Committee, which simply doesn’t plan to field a turnout effort as extensive as the one being built by the Obama camp. That choice reflects a definite difference in priorities between the two camps. Republicans are gambling that they can win this election from the top down: controlling news cycles, funding extensive TV advertising, and fielding a 48 hour GOTV program that has been successful in the past. The Obama campaign is waging everything on winning from the ground up: they’re training and organizing volunteers, registering hundreds of thousands of new voters, microtargeting persuadable demographics, and planning to win the election the same way the won the primary — by making sure all their voters show up at the polls. Even still, they’re spending as much as McCain on TV advertising in almost every battleground state (except Pennsylvania and Minnesota) and spending far more than McCain in some states like Virginia.
At this point, I still pretty good about betting money on Obama.
It’s interesting that Matt seems to write off the Republican GOTV strategy, as that strategy has been widely admired and praised in the past few elections. They’ve focused more on local volunteers–often organizing through churches–to convince their neighbors to vote, rather than bringing in college kids from four states over to talk to people they don’t know. They’ve been big on microtargeting, too, if I remember correctly. Obama is an organizer by training, so I’m sure his plan is at least as good–but is it really that much better? This has been the Dems’ big weakness in recent years, so it will be very impressive if he can turn the tables so quickly.
