Yesterday, all of the 2008 Presidential candidates filed their mandatory Federal Election Commission disclosure reports for the Fourth Quarter of 2007.
According to the Politico's Kenneth P. Vogel the two Democratic candidates, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama outraised the four Republican candidates, John McCain, Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee and Ron Paul for the 4th Quarter: $49.6mil (Democrats) to $42.2mil (Republicans).
The Center for Responsive Politics, which examines and analyzes campaign financial reports, broke out the individual campaigns' 4th quarter totals, such as total raised and the important cash-on-hand numbers:
As these graphs plainly demonstrate, either Democratic candidate handily outperformed all of the Republican candidates, except Romney, in the important money race for the last three months of 2007 (with Romney being the only Republican candidate on par with their numbers, but he achieved this by injecting over $17mil of his personal money into his campaign during this period).
These 4th Quarter 2007 numbers, where Clinton outperformed Obama, puts into context Obama's voluntary release of his January fundraising numbers. As reported by the Associated Press yesterday (here, for an article) the Obama campaign reported raising a record-setting $32mil for the month of January, which news they hope will offset Clinton's outraising them in the 4th Quarter of last year (and since Clinton has yet to release her January numbers its reasonable to conjecture she did not outperform Obama in the January money race).
What all this means for momentum and resources of Obama or Clinton at this juncture of the campaign is still unclear without concrete January numbers from Clinton for comparison. But, as I blogged a few weeks ago (here), this latest round of financials from the campaigns continue to demonstrate a higher level of enthusiasm and investment in the Democratic candidates over the Republicans, a meaningful measure of support and possible predictor of future performance, especially as the fields narrow and we move toward the General Election in November.
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