There’s one of those “winners and losers” pieces from the first big wave of financial disclosures by campaigns today at Bloomberg Politics, by Michael Bender. It’s hardly a full picture since it only counts official campaign money, which for some of these birds is a small percentage of their actual dough.
There are a couple of interesting tidbits, though. Rick Perry was significantly outraised by Jeb Bush (and slightly by Marco Rubio) in Texas. Both were massively outraised in the Long Star State by Ted Cruz, who led all GOP candidates in official money raises. And get this:
[Mike Huckabee] was near the top of national polls at the start of the year, but still barely raised more than Carly Fiorina, the former Hewlett-Packard Co. chief executive, who has never held elected office….
Less than a third of his $2 million has come from small-dollar donors, and Huckabee has spent more than half of what he’s raised.
Huck’s terrible fundraising deficiencies were his single biggest problem in 2008, and he was probably asked a hundred times going into this cycle if he had somehow acquired the Midas touch. Unless some billionaire is about to put some big money in a Super-PAC for him, looks like he’s got the same problem again, and if so, he’s probably going to get written off early despite his well of Christian Right support in Iowa. Actually, his whole campaign is beginning to look like a book tour; he’s become a very irregular attender of cattle calls. But he will be at what should be his stomping grounds tomorrow, the Family Leadership Summit in Iowa, and he’d best turn in a boffo performance.
