A Dollar Deluge

by Steve Soto

One of the benefits of developing a 1.5 million member donor list is that you can drown your GOP opponent in a two-month general election sprint. Politico.com ran a good story yesterday pointing out that Obama can use that list and those small donors to gather upwards of $300 million to smother McCain’s lackluster fundraising, even if McCain changes course and ditches public financing. Worse yet for the GOP, if Obama and Clinton were able to merge lists and allow Obama to pull large and small donations from the larger combined pool of Democratic donors, Team Obama could set up large operations in purple and even red states and force McCain to spend critical money just defending his electoral base.

Think about how much trouble the GOP would be in if Obama had the money to spend McCain into the ground in Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, the Mountain West, Missouri, and even Florida while Obama works to cinch up Ohio, Indiana, and Pennsylvania. The impact would not only be felt at the presidential level. If Obama can raise upwards of $300 million and spread it to so many states, the Democrats would have a real shot at building operational majorities in both houses of Congress.