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Hillary Tallies $26M for '08 Bid in Q1
by Josh Gerstein
Sun, 1 Apr 2007 at 2:08 PM
updated Sun, 1 Apr 2007 at 2:21 PM
Senator Clinton raised $26 million in the first quarter, her presidential campaign announced in a conference call this afternoon. A sum of $10 million transferred over from her '06 Senate bid will get her to $36 million in income.
Clinton aides pointed that the total blows away the Democratic high from 2004 of $7.4 million, but also said they expect Senator Obama to have raised a "comparable amount" to Mrs. Clinton's $26 million.
"There's going to be a race. No one ever said that we were going to walk away with this," the chair of Mrs. Clinton's campaign, Terence McAuliffe said.
If Mr. Obama is really within striking financial range of the frontrunner, that will be a big deal. However, some key questions about the Q1 numbers are still to be answered....
Among the unanswered questions after today's call: How many donors have "maxed-out" by giving $2,300 in money for the primary campaign? And how much of the $26 million was in donations to Mrs. Clinton's general election treasury, a fund that she can't access until she has clinched the nomination?
Campaign aides said they didn't know those details yet, and probably wouldn't until closer to the April 15 deadline to file a formal report with the Federal Election Commission
"We have dramatically exceeded our goals and expectations," Mrs. Clinton's campaign manager, Patti Solis Doyle, said
"We are ecstatic about where we are today," Mr. McCauliffe said. Asked to react to rumors that Mr. Obama has also shot past the $20 million mark some saw as a benchmark for first-tier candidates, Mr. McCauliffe said, "He's out there. He's exciting people. It's great for the party."
The Clinton campaign said $6 million came from grassroots donations, with about $4.2 from the Web and $1.8 million from direct mail.
The campaign's finance chief, Jonathan Mantz, said the number of people whogave the $2,300 maximum was still being determined. "We feel great about where we're headed in the next quarter and the months to come," he said. The max-out issue could be a critical indicator of whether the fundraising is sustainable, since small donors can be hit up repeatedly, but, under campaign finance laws, the writers of big checks
cannot be dunned.
Also no indication today of how fast the Clinton campaign is burning up the cash it raised. The $26 million tally is a gross figure that doesn't include the costs of fund-raising events, travel, or the burgeoning campaign staff.
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