Obama recruits more than 400,000 donors
At the end of the first significant fundraising quarter of the 2012 election cycle, President Obama had collected donations from nearly half a million donors, more than twice as many as he had at the same point four years ago.
The Obama campaign has collected money from 493,697 individual donors, his campaign announced on Twitter. By this time in 2007, the Obama campaign had only amassed 180,000 contributors.
Mr. Obama and the Democratic National Committee aimed to raise $60 million in the second quarter of this year for his re-election campaign -- the same amount Mr. Obama raised for his first presidential campaign in the second quarter of 2007. They have yet to announce whether they met that goal.
The second quarter ended Midnight Thursday, and information on the candidates' fundraising will be made public on July 15.
None of the Republican presidential candidates are expected to come close to Mr. Obama's fundraising numbers, and their hauls are expected to be smaller than what GOP nominees took in around this time in the last election.
Mitt Romney, for instance, is expected to report less than $20 million raised. Even though the candidate last month reported raising more than $10 million in one day, the Los Angeles Times reports that the sum actually represented donations made over multiple days.
Pawlenty, one of the first Republicans to officially enter the race, brought in less than $5 million, the New York Times reports. That puts him on par with Jon Huntsman, who only entered the race nine days ago but has raised more than $4 million -- albeit, some from his own pocketbook.
Ahead of the quarter's close, the Pawlenty campaign told CBS News, "Our numbers will show that we're on track... raising the resources we need to execute our strategies in the early states."
