The Daily Background

In these final hours of frantic fundraising before the first fundraising quarter of the 2008 elections per the FEC is over, candidates are sending emails out to their email lists asking supporters if they can spare a few more dollars before the midnight deadline.

Although the full fundraising and expenditure reports from each campaign are not due at the FEC for another two weeks, campaigns will likely either announce or leak their totals sometime in the coming days. The question is, who be the big surprises for raising more (or less) money than people expected.

Of course, it’s good to have a handle on some reasonable expectations before numbers start leaking out. Here’s my man Marc Ambinder of The National Journal/The Hotline:

Sen. Hillary Clinton will raise between $23M and $30M.

Sen. John McCain will raise between $18M and $22M.

Sen. Barack Obama will raise between $18M and $24M.

Ex-MA Gov. Mitt Romney will raise between $19M and $21M. ** Romney is not raising general election money yet.

Ex-Sen. John Edwards will raise between $13M and $17M.

Ex-NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani will raise between $12M and $15M.

Of course, as everyone points out, it isn’t just the amount of money they’ve raised that’s important– it’s also how fast they’re spending it (the “burn rate”) and how much cash they actually have in the bank ready to be spent (the “cash on hand”).

Jerome Armstrong over at MyDD says he’s heard some rumor that Obama is going to post a number somewhere around $35M, which to me seems awfully high– more than $10M more than the National Journal estimates. I just talked to Marc, who said he’s expecting somewhere around 20-25M, slightly revised from his estimates which I quoted earlier, but still in the same neighborhood.

Filed under: Presidential election, Z-TDB Blog