The first quarter fundraising results are in and the first gold medal for the invisible primary goes to Mitt Romney! In fact, his PAC brings in more in the time period than Pawlenty’s, Palin’s and Huckabee’s respective PACs combined.

I have been curious to see how this quarter’s results would turn out since there were so many asterisks involved with last years results. Last year there were a number of factors that skewed the outcome (though Romney still led) that is just wasn’t possible to compare apples to apples. BUT this quarter, all the PAC’s are established and the playing field is level.

Without further ado, the results:

Note: my numbers do not show that Mitt’s PAC also raised an additional $157,000 from their affiliate state-based PACs of the same name. That puts Mitt’s actual total at $1.6 million. I’ll include that in my numbers next time around.

My analysis:

• Romney is far and away the leader in fundraising, but the others do have some limitations with their responsibilities for their respective jobs and public office. In any case I think Romney would still lead. An important reason to address this is that powerful fundraising will be vital in the general election.
• Not shown in the results is the fact that Romney brought in a HUGE $950,000 in March alone, boosting his quarter total. Two possible reasons for this boost could be his constant touring through the month on his book tour as well as his “Repeal the Bill” campaign. Though he has not had any official fundraisers (that I know of) in March, his public profile was raised substantially during the period which could have resulted in more contributions. In all he did 27 Official Book Tour events in March as well as dozens of media appearances and interviews.
• Romney disbursed far more than any candidate in the quarter, again due to his extremely busy travel schedule etc., for his book tour in March. He also has a much larger political organization to support. The good side to this is that if he decides to announce next year for office the transition will be easy because the team will be in place.
• Though Romney’s burn rate is the highest, he still has more cash on hand than the other PACs, and still took in more than was distributed for the overall period. That’s what the money is there for – to be used.
• Romney’s total contributions to other candidates for federal office is the highest – all of which was given in the month of May as part of his “Repeal the Bill” campaign.
• Pawlenty impresses me with his ability to out raise Palin and Huckabee, especially given their much higher name recognition.
• Palin’s PAC has announced that they will focus more on fundraising this quarter so look for better numbers from her next time around.
• Huckabee’s percentage of funds given to other candidates is noble, but he is still needs to find some way to boost his overall fundraising numbers. He may get lot done on little fundraising for the primaries, but that is not going to work for the general election, should he win the nomination. One can argue that it is not as necessary for him to raise funds now and he can do so when the primaries start, but the other candidates will his the ground running with their networks leaving Huckabee in a game of catch-up. The time to build those networks is now.

That’s it. Let me know what you think. For the analysis I did for last years numbers you can see the post I did on Feb. 5th by clicking here.

Good work Romney and congratulations to the Free and Strong America PAC!

~Nate Gunderson

Source(Full FEC filings): Romney , Pawlenty , Palin , Huckabee

UPDATE: The Free and Strong America Releases a list of federal candidates they supported financially this quarter. You can find the press release by clicking here.

On March 13th my brothers (Luke and Aaron) and I attended the Salt Lake City stop of Mitt Romney’s No Apology Tour. We bought tickets for the event, and we got one Gold ticket so I could cover the Gold reception before the main event – it turned out that we got press passes the day before the event, thanks to Aaron sending an email request to the Hinckley Institute. The press passes were very nice. They allowed us to roam the aisles and get close up to the front during the event to get some photos and even some video on my little hand-held video camera. (Karen said that we were never in our seats.)

Not sure exactly what to expect, my brothers and I did some preparations to promote this site while we were there knowing there would be thousands of Mitt Romney fans everywhere. The doors opened at 4PM for the 7PM event and there were plenty of people there already to talk to. We brought up several hundred of our Mitt ’12 bumper stickers as incentives for people to sign an email list. With the help of two willing volunteers James Taylor and Eric Hatch, we were able to gather a few hundred emails. We will be contacting them soon with info about our site and an invitation to subscribe to our blog feed via email.

The MRC crew: Aaron, Nate, Luke, Eric and James

I attended the Gold Reception before the main event. There were a number of familiar faces, but I mostly took pictures and video while snacking on the food. It was there that I ran into long-time friend and co-blogger (CommittedtoRomney.com) Ann Marie Curling and her husband Joel – it was great to see her and catch up with life since they moved to Utah from Kentucky. I did briefly chat with Josh Romney – I asked him if he had any connections and could get me a No Apology t-shirt that all the volunteers were wearing. Unfortunately he didn’t have any connections. Luke, Aaron, Ben, and James were troopers and gathered all the emails while I was up hobnobbing. Thanks guys.

Mitt’s comments were as astute as usual. And Ann Romney was gracious as always. Beyond that there is not much more I can say about it that isn’t revealed better in the videos below.

Click here to see our gallery of 14 pictures of this event on our Facebook page.

Video #1: Prep. Short video shows you a little about how we make our Mitt ’12 bumper stickers. It’s a nice little ad for us too.

Video #2: From the reception: Ann and Mitt both speak, crowd shots, and singing happy birthday to Mitt

Video #3: Main Event: Selected clips, Q&A, crowd shots. Includes questions about Health Care.

Video #4: 12 year old asks Romney if he’s going to run for president.

(I already embedded this video in another post. Romney gives a great response the question. Click here to see it.)

Sorry for multiple videos. I honestly couldn’t think of what to cut so I ended up putting in all four. It was a great event to attend. If you live near a city which Romney will be visiting on his book tour, make the effort to get there. You won’t regret it.

~Nate Gunderson

…and gets an awesome picture with the big man himself. Really, I think the picture is great, so I posted it thinking Ross might not do it himself.

So Ross, when you get a chance edit this post and tell us how the evening went. The floor is yours….

~Nate

I wish I had more time to give you all a full report, but that will have to wait until tomorrow.

Here are just a few quick tidbits:

-800-900 books were signed Governor Romney in my estimation. Articles like this say 450 people showed up which isn’t accurate because most people left as soon as their book was signed, but people were flowing into the store all night long. That’s why Mitt had to stay a full two hours.

-I was told that this was the first stop that continued to grow in size after it started. (People that were in the area either heard about it after it had started or regular shoppers at this Borders stopped in and decided to buy a book and get it signed since Mitt was there and it was such a great opportunity.)

-There was decent news coverage.

-If anyone didn’t already know this, Birmingham is where Mitt grew up, and some of his family were in attendance – like his sister.

-We had plenty of volunteers and people kept asking us how they could get the volunteer shirt we all we wearing.

~Ross

Mitt Romney returns to roots in Metro Detroit Click the preceding link for some video.

Romney Rocks Borders

Mitt also stopped in Grand Rapids the day after he was in Birmingham:

Dave P.

Please join us in welcoming another excellent Team Member here at Mitt Romney Central, Dave P.

Dave is excited to help Romney fans stay up-to-date on all the important issues. Although Dave’s skill-set is versatile, his specific role will be to add informative content to the ‘On The Issues’, ‘Speeches’, and ‘Op-ed’ pages here at MRC; its a busy job that will include lots of research and fact-finding, coupled with consistent updating. With Dave’s help, we hope to be able to use MRC as a complete resource for everything Mitt-related …You’ll be able to look up Romney’s position/stance/view on any issue and have access to relevant quotes, links, and video to back it up!

To learn more about our new team member, you may visit his profile page here.

Welcome to the Team, Dave …We’re thrilled to have you onboard!

That's Dave at a Romney Ralley in Minnesota!