The Daily Background
| 3 Possible reasons why Obama’s campaign hasn’t released their Q1 fundraising numbers yet
by Arlen Parsa
So everybody is still waiting for Obama’s campaign to announce his Q1 fundraising numbers. Virtually all the other candidates, both Democratic and Republican (and certainly all of the top candidates) have announced what they will officially report to the FEC on April 15th.
The question is: why haven’t Obama’s folks spoken yet?
Three theories come to mind. One of them is very unlikely, another one is somewhat unlikely, and the third seems the most likely at this point in time.
Firstly, and most unlikely, there is a slight possibility that in Obama’s quest to wage a “different campaign” he doesn’t want his people to make a big fuss over how much money they have raised, and therefore they won’t be leaking it or announcing it until the FEC releases all their numbers for all of the candidates officially. This seems quite unlikely, just because nobody in their right mind would forego the good press that would result from announcing good fundraising numbers, which everybody thinks Obama has at the moment.
The second explanation, only slightly less likely is that Obama’s camp really doesn’t know how much money they’ve raised in the first quarter of ‘07. The idea behind this explanation is that Obama’s camp is a bunch of crazy crazy rookies and they don’t know math. Again, this is incredibly unlikely and borderline impossible, although slightly more likely than the previous explanation.
Which brings us to the third explanation. And the most likely, in my mind. There is a possibility that Obama has some really, really incredible numbers to announce. There’s a nutty rumor flying around that says Obama has raised 35M which is absurd, but if he raises anything over 20M, it’ll make huge news. Unlike Hillary, Obama has no national network. And unlike Romney, Obama is not one of the 1,000 richest men on the planet who happens to know like 999 of the other richest men on the planet.
There are already signals that Obama’s campaign has the most actual indvidual donors, and this may lead to some really big news when he announces his numbers. The idea behind this theory is that Obama will wait for everyone else to announce their numbers (which most everyone has now), and then make everyone wait a bit longer, and finally grab huge headlines by saying that he’s raised extremely close to Hillary’s figure of 26M.
