Mitt Romney and the Republican Party significantly outraised President Barack Obama and the Democrats in July, marking the third straight month that the presumptive Republican nominee has decisively led in the money race.
Romney overcame a month of embarrassing gaffes and tough polls to raise $101.3 million along with the Republican National Committee. Obama and the Democratic National Committee managed only $75 million.
The Republicans’ owe much of their big haul to a small number of large donors. The Romney campaign has said that 600,627 contributions received in July were under $250, totaling $25.7 million. This means that the other $75.6 million — or 75% of the total — came from just 38,000 donors, about 6 percent of the total number of contributors.
Romney held several high profile fundraisers in July that certainly contributed to his big fundraising month. The Hill estimates that Romney raised $3 million at a fundraiser at David Koch’s Southampton estate (no thanks to the “Nails ladies,“) $2 million at a London fundraiser with bankers who are caught up in the LIBOR scandal, and $1 million at a Jerusalem fundraiser (during which Romney claimed that the economic disparities between Israelis and Palestinians are due to cultural differences.)
The Obama campaign, clearly nervous about being outspent, has been sending a series of increasingly urgent fundraising emails featuring subject lines such as “This is potentially devastating” and “We could lose if this continues.”
Still, as Byron Tau points out in Politico, the Obama campaign remains on pace to handily beat its record-breaking 2008 fundraising total.
