Not yet but it's probably going to happen if the primary continues on for longer. The problem is most of his big donors have maxed out to the legal limit and he doesn't have that much appeal to the small-donor types.

He sunk 45 million into his campaign in 2008. Assuming he's willing to go up to that and slightly beyond, I think that's ~2 months of campaign expenses at his current spending clip. So if he didn't get another dime but did self-fund up to what he did in 2008, he'd be good through May or so. So it's hard to envision him going broke before his competitors.

And remember Romney's Super PAC (Restore Our Future) is much better funded than his competitors do and is doing most of the negative ad dirty work on his behalf.

Yeah, I guess with the superpacs that it's not correct to do an apples to apples comparison with 08. Without the superpacs, Romney would probably have raised much more money.

Note that the 45 million he dropped in 2008 could clearly have been seen by Romney at the time as building on *this* campaign. A bit of future profile building. So the one counterpoint might be that he has no plans to run in 2016 and would be loathe to drop his own money into this campaign when he has no political aspirations beyond this race.

The flipside to that is he's so close to winning it's hard to imagine he wouldn't drop a lot of his own money to get himself across the finish line.

Right. Obama spent a ****ton of money in 2007/2008 building those small donor networks and lists so he could milk the **** out of donors for $5-$50 a piece once he maxed out on the rich donors. The Super PACs make those kind of efforts potentially useless -- why bother building that kind of apparatus when you can just milk rich people for unlimited amounts? Seems like Romney has made the calculated effort to hit up his rich donors for the max and then not spend so much time trying to build up a small donor base and instead let his Super PAC raise the money instead. One result from that kind of strategy would be only getting small amounts of money through your official campaign channels late in the primary season.

Back a long long time ago, I made the case that Romney's team was full of actual professionals and the results bear that out. Not only in getting his name on the ballot and stuff, like the trivially easy stuff.

His campaign team seems to be well-hedged for the absolute worst case money scenarios, which is kind of manifesting now: Romney is in the lead and still in the race moving to the mid-late stages of the game -- so he still needs money. But there's a handful of ankle-biters causing trouble, and his official campaign dollars are drying up, but he can self-fund at 2008 levels and still get to the convention. If his team is doing they're job, they mapped this out a long time ago and got R.Money's sign off on self funded monies for the late game, and plotted out how much they needed to raise and how much they could spend if things got troublesome in NH and Florida and Michigan (i.e., they spent more than they raised), which ended up happening.

Oklahoma has a ton of Dixiecrats. 33% of 2008 voters who ID'd as Democrats voted for McCain. And seeing as voter ID isn't the same as voter registration (see here, Democrats are still a plurality of registered voters), it's probable McCain did even better amongst registered Democrats. No surprise that Obama struggles to win Democrats that won't even vote for him against a Republican.

The downside is Romney doesn't have the huge database of voters to not only tap into for money, but also to send updates/communications/ads, as well as use for GOTV efforts, making phone calls, organizing, etc.

It speaks to having a motivated base.

The 11 million figure is not good for Romney especially if it again is from maxed out donors especially when you consider that Obama raised something like 5 million from 1 fundraising night in February.

After January Obama had something like 75 million - 7 million cash on hand advantage. You'd have to think that after super tuesday not only has Romney spent that money and some but Obama has added more to his war chest.

As long as this nomination race keeps going that gap will widen more and more and once you get to 6 figure numbers it becomes very very hard for Super PACS to make up the difference.

yes it was a joke Phill

Mary ****stress Fallin was on TV yesterday talking about how "Oklahoma is the reddest state in the nation! McCain/Palin won the highest percent of votes in Oklahoma, and they won every county in Oklahoma!"



LirvA was not amused

If I wasn't on a damn proprietary, monopolistic iPad, I'd check the validity of that statement. As it is, apple decided flash isn't important for me to have so I don't get to decide for myself.

I don't get why Romney should be worried about the donation cap. Can't he simply use his campaign money for organizational stuff and travel and have the superpac do all the heavy lifting with the unlimited money it gets?

YES! YES YES YES YES YES!!!!!

This is why the Republicans attempted to change the primary process. But, being Republicans, they massively ****ed it up. I don't know if you should blame Steele, Preibus, Rove, or just Republicans in general. They wanted the Obama/Clinton long slough building donor lists, volunteers, and positive ratings. What they got was Romney outspending a bunch of retreads with negative advertizing because none of the candidate could generate the enthusiasm and love to get volunteers. And, a schedule and rules that weren't finalized until the last minute. On a measure of organization the GOP deserves a grade of F for this primary process.

If you want Obama vs Clinton, you have to have candidates of that stature. Depending on your political persuasion, Romney comes in as a slightly smarter John Edwards or Richardson with looks. Chris Dodd and Joe Biden as cellar dwellers were more credible than Bachmann as a frontrunner.

I guess the moral of this story is, beware what you ask for. In this case, the Republicans wanted an extended evaluation of their candidates, and they got it. Probably to their detriment.

I like to think of Oklahoma as how white people in Texas wish Texas was.

Restore our Future is buying basically all the airtime here in memphis ahead of the mississippi primary (there are a ****-ton of people in the memphis suburbs in north mississippi). Probably more than they bought before super tuesday.

I've been in a field not showering for the last week. At first glance, it looks like Super Tuesday was awfully good to R. Money and he's inevitable again. Confirm/deny?

It was good enough that he's still more or less inevitable to the layman and the betting markets. It wasn't so good that the media or his competitors are forced to play along yet.

Good for Romney but not good enough to lock up the nomination and force the other candidates out. But Santorum is the closest and he'll have to run perfect to get close so it's all but in the bag for Romney.

Edit: slow pony

Think I heard this morning that Mitt needs 47% of the remaining delegates to secure the nomination. Seems in the bag.

on pinnacle romney was -700 before it probably got pounded so hard the market closed up again

happy with my +200 and +300 on romney, but pretty tilted that black friday kept me from getting 10x the action down

I think the republicans gambled that the economy would still be in the ****ter and Obama's approval would be so low that they'd have a more realistic chance to win this thing.

Yahoo declares Ron Paul President.



http://news.yahoo.com/ron-paul-s-poi...residency.html

does that make al gore his VP?