The Daily Background

In mid-July, I commented on Mitt Romney’s eyebrow-raising campaign fund burn-rate:

If the way Mitt Romeney has been conducting his campaign sheds any light on how the former Massachusetts governor might be as a president, Republicans who support him may need to take a second look at the candidate who claims he is not a “tax and spender.”

Aside from the McCain campaign’s famously-fast burn rate which has led the 70 year old’s campaign into anemic finances, Romney seems to have spent the most amount of money of all the candidates, according to FEC filings due to be released on Monday. Romney has far outdistanced other candidates, both Democrat and Republican, in early ad spending, and has seen an improvement in his Iowa and New Hampshire polling as a result. Still, Romney’s tendency to throw money out the window is raising some eyebrows.
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Although ordinary people are only allowed to donate $2,300 to a campaign per contest (another $2,300 can be donated for the general election), candidates can donate as much money as they like to finance their own campaigns.

At that time, Romney had spent about $21M of the $44M he had raised (and that figure includes his own sizeable donations). Indeed, two days later I remarked “Spending money at a faster rate than you get it is an awful way to run a government and a pretty bad way to run a campaign as well, so fiscal conservatives should think twice about Romney’s tendency to splurge. Take for example the extravagant party he threw (using campaign funds) for top-dollar donors recently.”

Jonathan Singer muses today about Romney’s big spending habits, and suggests Romney’s anything-but-frugal habits in the primary doesn’t bode well for a general election:

Clearly, Mitt Romney is a wealthy man. We didn’t have to wait for his remarkably belated financial disclosure today, which showed he is sitting on a pot of money of upwards of $250 million, to figure that out. Indeed, because of this personal wealth Romney has been able to invest about $9 million of his own money into his campaign as of the end of June, money that has allowed him to stay on-air (in Iowa and elsewhere) and generally keep his campaign going (without the money his campaign finance filings would look a lot like that of John McCain — too much spending and not enough fundraising).

But while Romney is clearly wealthy, he is not wealthy enough to buy a general election on his own, as he may be able to do a Republican primary. At the rate that Romney spent per vote in the Ames straw poll this last week he would have to spend between $27.5 billion and $62 billion in order to win the popular vote (assuming George W. Bush’s roughly 62 million votes in 2004 would be sufficient to win in 2008). Romney doesn’t have nearly this kind of cash, nor would he spend it if he did (one would hope).

Singer notes that while primary votes are more expensive than general election votes, “the fact that Romney spent perhaps as much as 17 times more per vote this last weekend than did second-place finisher Mike Huckabee indicates that Romney is not nearly as strong as some might believe.”

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