Thursday, January 31, 2008

JOHN MCCAIN, HILLARY CLINTON

Will McCain Have The Cash To Compete?

Campaign Spot reader Steve asks whether, if McCain gets the nomination, he'll have enough money to compete, offering a list of concerns:

1. He is by his own admission a poor fund-raiser.
2. While conservatives like myself will probably vote for him, I don't think he will get a lot of donations from them. I know he will not from me.
3. Given McCain Feingold, a very significant percentage of his funds must be generated from folks like me.
4. Neither the Clinton fund-raising machine nor the Obama wave have lacked for monetary resources or are likely to.
5. Polls held just before primaries have been notoriously unreliable. Head-to-head match up polls held now for a November election can not possibly be expected to have any degree of accuracy - & to my mind are irrelevant.

On paper, it would appear to be trouble. The fact that McCain ended the year with debt is another ominous sign.

But McCain would have a few advantages.

1) He's done much better in raising funds since he started winning. His campaign estimates they took in $7 million in the first three weeks of January. I'm sure they're spending it almost as fast as it comes in, but it suggests that there is a bandwagon effect, and that at least some GOP donors have been sitting on the sidelines, waiting for a frontrunner to emerge.

2) If he runs against Hillary, I suspect the Republican checkbooks will open. Rick Lazio raised $33 million for his Senate race against her. Against Obama, I'm not so sure...

3) The classic case of insufficient finances sinking a candidate was Bob Dole in 1996, when the DNC ran a bunch of allegedly-uncoordinated-with-the-Clinton-campaign “issue ads” that talked about how great Clinton was and how Dole was “tax collector for the welfare state,” using an old Newt Gingrich quote. (Yup, the DNC attacked Bob Dole from the right, and used their hated nemesis Newt to do it.) Those ads worked because they effectively defined Dole before he could make his case to the American people. Besides whatever inherent flaws and weaknesses were present in the Dole campaign, by the time the convention rolled around (when the Dole campaign gained access to federal matching funds), many Americans’ impressions of him had been set.

For McCain, I think the public’s impressions of him are more clearly established, and better, than they were for Bob Dole in spring 1996.

As for whether head-to-head poll matchups at this point are reliable... well, they're all we have to go on right now. Maybe Mitt Romney would have a great spring, summer, and fall, and match up fantastically in November. I would note, however, that McCain has matched up pretty well against Hillary and Obama pretty consistently throughout the past year, and Romney (and Huckabee and Thompson, for that matter) been pretty blah by comparison. Giuliani bounced around a bit, good in some, lousy in others.

UPDATE: From one of my readers:

"Fox reported Tuesday night that several of the old Bush Pioneers who were working for Rudy immediately switched to McCain at Rudy’s request and have already begun to shake trees for him. "

01/31 10:13 AMShare