Winning The Struggle to Keep Up With Bush’s Campaign Spending

As Kash pointed out in the previous post, Bush has a very big financial edge over John Kerry. I don’t think that Kerry can, or even needs to, raise more money than Bush. He just needs to raise enough to get his message out and respond rapidly and effectively to attacks. And Howard Dean showed the way for a Democrat to do just that: small donations from a very broad base. In fact, Kerry just raised $10 million in ten days online.

So I am very pleasantly surprised to see that readers’ contributions to Kerry’s campaign over the weekend far exceeded my expectations. On Friday, I pointed out that Atrios’ readers had ponied up $14,000 in one week (and $42,000 cumulative!), did a quick adjustment for the relative traffic of each blog, and asked my readers to pony up $100-$200 per week. Here’s what readers have given so far:

Total Donations: 8

Total Dollars: $340

Average Donation: $42.50

Excellent! Adding my first reader-inspired contribution to that number, this blog has now sent $590 Kerry’s way. I think $10,000 is a reasonable cumulative contribution goal for this blog, and some larger number may not be out of the question.

An important note on the timing of contributions, from Dick Bell, Kerry’s blogmaster:

After the convention, Kerry will be taking public funds, so there will be no more individual contributions after the convention.

So you need to make your contributions between now and early August — for example, my initial plan to save my donations until October when things really heat up was a bad idea. Of course, if October does roll around and you’re flush with cash, I believe you can give to the DNC, which can then spend money on get out the vote drives and the like.

AB