March totals are in. Sort of.
Obama has raised "more than $40 million" last month. Clinton raised just over $20 million.
But... That seemed like a big enough story on its own that I had been ignoring the details. Thankfully, AmericaBlog's Joe Sudbay did not:
Apparently, we'll be waiting for several weeks before we see the Clinton total for March. This is significant. Very significant. In the past, the Clinton campaign jumped out front to release its campaign numbers -- often before the reporting period had even ended. Even when Clinton had a bad month in January, only raising $13.5 million, Terry McAuliffe revealed the number on February 4th. We knew on February 28, 2008 that Clinton had raised $35 million in February. Not this time. According to Howard Wolfson, on a Clinton campaign conference call, we may see the tax returns soon, but the Clinton campaign will not be releasing its March fundraising total until the filing deadline, which is the 20th of the month. That's not a good sign for Team Clinton. What are they trying to hide?
There are two separate issues here to keep in mind.
Issue One: Allocation. Because Clinton began the campaign with the assumption that she would win the nomination, she immediately began raising money for the general election. Despite the fact that under FEC rules that money cannot be spent during the primary campaign, it is reported to the media as part of the monthly fundraising total. For example, although Clinton has $33 million in the bank at the end of February, only $11 million was available for the primary. So the first question here is how much of that $20 million from this month is in her primary account, and how much of it is off limits until the fall?
The answer to this first question is particularly important given issue #2: debt. Although Clinton had $11 million in the bank at the end of February, she had nearly $9 million in outstanding debts. (Obama, by contrast, had $31 million for the primaries, with less than $1 million in debt). Given the pace of the campaign, I think its fairly safe to assume that those debt numbers have only grown. But by how much?
As Joe writes, the delay would seem to suggest that things aren't going great for Clinton. And although I can understand the impulse behind sitting on bad news, I can't for the life of me understand why you would want to hold back until the weekend before the PA primary. That just makes no sense to me at all.
UPDATE: Reading the tea leaves, it seems "almost all" of both candidate's totals are for the primary. We'll see...
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