by Mike Dorning
Barack Obama has raised “at least” $32 million during January for use in the primary, campaign manager David Plouffe said in a conference call with reporters this morning.
The campaign added 170,000 new donors this month, for a total of 650,00 donors, Plouffe added.
“Obviously this contest could go on for some time in the primary, and we think that the strength of our financial position and the number of donors does speak to financial sustainability, Plouffe said. “If this ends up going through March and April, we think we’re going to have the resources necessary to conduct vigorous campaigns in every state to come.”
Campaign spokesman Bill Burton declined to provide the amount of money that campaign has on hand, a better measure of financial strength than donations. Nor would Burton provide figures on campaign spending during the month.
The Obama campaign is already putting money into the contests following the Feb. 5 quasi-national primary. The campaing will begin airing television ads tomorrow in all of the states with primaries and caucuses in the week following the “Super Tuesday” vote: Louisiana, Washington state, Nebraska, Maine, Virginia, Maryland and Washington, DC.
The Clinton campaign has not yet responded to a query on its January fundraising progress.
But both Obama and Clinton have shown enormous financial strength, with both campaigns raising more than $100 million last year for their campaigns, an unprecedented pace of fundraising and one that has not been matched by any of the Republican candidates in the field.
The pace of Obama’s fundraising has been “remarkably consistent” over the course of the month, Plouffe said. But the campaign’s biggest fundraising day so far this month was the day following the Illinois senator’s defeat in the New Hampshire primary, he said. Obama sent out a mass email fundraising appeal the day after the defeat entitled “We knew this would be hard.”
“We took a lot of encouragement from that because it showed the resolve of our existing donor base. But we also added a large amount of donors on that day,” Plouffe said.
