Nearly 250 bundlers have raised $50,000 or more for President Obama just three months into the 2012 campaign, including more than two dozen who have each raised $500,000 or more.
The bundler list and other data released Friday provide further evidence of an astonishingly successful fundraising effort by Obama even amid a struggling economy and mediocre approval ratings.
Obama’s official campaign raised $46.3 million and spent $11 million from April to June of this year, according to new documents filed with the Federal Election Commission. That left it with a whopping $37 million in case, including money left over from the first quarter. Obama also brought in $39.3 million in a joint fundraising effort with the Democratic National Committee, filings show.
The numbers put Obama far ahead of his GOP rivals, who are led by former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney with about $18 million raised. The rest of the Republican field lags well behind with $5 million or less raised by each of them in the second quarter.
Obama’s biggest fundraisers include longtime supporters such as Hollywood mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg, former New Jersey governor Jon Corzine and fashion editor Anna Wintour, all of whom have raised more than $500,000 for Obama’s re-election effort, according to the campaign’s bundlers data. But there are new names on the list as well, such as Marc Benioff, a tech CEO who runs salesforce.com.
Hollywood super-agent Ari Emanuel, the brother of former White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, helped raise between $50,000 and $100,000, the campaign said.
The sheer number of bundlers--and the volume of donations they represent--signals another potential juggernaut campaign for Obama, who shattered all records in 2008 by raising $745 million. Obama had 47 bundlers during the entire 2008 campaign who raised $500,000 or more--a number he is already more than halfway to matching.
Obama’s joint fundraising operation with the DNC raised more than $39 million, mainly through a group of fundraising events held by the party that were attended by Obama. Nearly 600 contributors gave the maximum to the committee, donating $35,800, according to the reports filed Friday. The first $5,000 of that goes to Obama’s campaign, and the rest to the national party.
Campaign officials said previously that more than 550,000 individual donors had contributed to Obama’s re-election effort in the second quarter--including 260,000 new donors--with an average contribution amount less than $70.
Campaign aides have emphasized those numbers in arguing that Obama is planning to rely heavily on grassroots supporters for re-election.
But the data released Friday also show that wealthier contributors will be a crucial part of his fundraising operation. Obama raised more than $20 million, or nearly a quarter of his total fundraising, from people who gave the maximum possible contribution.
Source: www.washingtonpost.com
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