The Obama campaign fundraising machine has debuted a new text message tool with encouraging results for the President’s bean counters. On Wednesday, the Obama campaign sent out an SMS message to cell phones and smart phones of tens of thousands of previous donors asking them to give more money. “Support Pres Obama in less than [...]
Campaign Finance
The most recent filing by Restore Our Future, the technically independent group supporting the candidacy of Mitt Romney, revealed a number of firms—a for-profit school, several payday lenders, and a chemical company–whose bottom lines have been threatened or harmed by regulations supported by the Obama Administration.
President Obama is having difficulty attracting the kinds of large checks that buoyed his candidacy in 2008 and that usually sustain an incumbent President’s fund-raising efforts. Mitt Romney, meanwhile, is seeing the other side of the coin. Of the $63 million Romney had raised by the end of January, just one dollar in ten came from donors who gave $200 or less.
Campaign reporters have blind spots. I can tell you, for instance, what happens when you go on BarackObama.com, or what happens when you sign up for the Barack Obama Facebook app, or what happens when you tell the campaign you want to donate money online. I cannot, however, tell you what happens after you donate [...]
Consider this campaign finance reformer’s nightmare scenario: Corporate interests flood a presidential election with money, ballooning campaign spending at six times the norm, and throwing a 5-to-1 spending advantage to the eventual winner largely because of one issue. This is not what’s happening in 2012. It’s what transpired in 1896:
We live in the age of the iPhone, yet the 2012 presidential campaign has so far been run on Betamax. In the Republican primary, new media and mobile technologies are next to incidental, subsumed by a nostalgic embrace of a technology that was cutting edge in the 1960s: television.
The super PAC backing Mitt Romney raised $7 million in January, topping off its deep reservoir of funds and allowing the group to flood media markets from Sioux City to Sarasota with advertising. Its FEC disclosure on Monday revealed that the extensive effort to elevate Romney and bury the competition relied on a set of donors that runs the gamut from famous heirs and CEOs to the most opaque and controversial kind of corporate interests.
Following a now familiar pattern in the GOP nominating contest, Rick Santorum’s Feb. 7 hat trick and sudden surge in the Michigan primary polls have motivated Mitt Romney’s ad men. Restore Out Future, the Romney-backing super PAC, has bought more than $800,000 of TV time in Michigan, slathering local broadcasts with the same caustic goo [...]
With social network giant Facebook officially gearing up for its initial public offering, the company’s top executives and largest investors are poised for a historic windfall. But far from Silicon Valley or Wall Street, there is another group of folks positioned to prosper from what is expected to be the biggest tech IPO ever — [...]
Thursday’s Boston Globe explains how the pro-Newt Gingrich forces have suddenly leveled the advertising playing field in Florida, where Mitt Romney’s camp has been spending big for weeks. That of course is largely thanks to Gingrich’s patron saint, the billionaire Las Vegas casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, who has just written his second $5 million check [...]
