By Matea Gold and Joseph Tanfani, Washington Bureau

August 21, 2012, 5:44 a.m.
WASHINGTON — Mitt Romney widened his cash advantage over President Obama in July as the president's reelection campaign continued to wage a costly air assault against the Republican presidential challenger, racing through more money than it raised.

Obama's reelection effort and related Democratic fundraising committees had $127 million left at the end of July, while the Romney campaign and its Republican allies sat on $186 million, according to campaign finance reports filed Monday with the Federal Election Commission.

The cash imbalance reflects both the prodigious fundraising by Romney, who outraised Obama for the third month in a row, and the massive expenditures by the president's reelection campaign — largely on a barrage of ads criticizing Romney's tax plan as favoring the rich and linking him to his private equity firm's investments in companies that outsourced jobs.

With three months to go before election day, the Obama campaign and the Democratic National Committee had already spent half a billion dollars this cycle, according to a Los Angeles Times/Tribune Washington Bureau calculation of data from FEC filings and the nonpartisan Campaign Finance Institute.

Romney and his affiliated GOP committees had spent about $350 million through the end of July.

But the former Massachusetts governor has been flanked by an array of deep-pocketed "super PACs" and nonprofit advocacy groups that are pumping tens of millions of dollars into the race on his behalf, vastly outspending a pro-Obama super PAC.

In July, Romney and the Republican National Committee outraised Obama and his Democratic allies $101 million to $75 million

Obama's campaign raced through nearly $59 million last month, about the same as it spent in June, while raising $49 million.

The reelection campaign made another enormous ad buy in July, spending nearly $39 million on television spots through GMMB, a Washington advertising and media placement firm, and $8.6 million on digital marketing through Bully Pulpit Interactive, a firm run by digital strategists who worked on Obama's 2008 campaign.

Another $4.3 million went to pay hundreds of campaign staffers.

The Romney campaign stayed in the black, raising $40 million while spending just under $33 million in July. More than half — nearly $18 million — went to pay American Rambler Productions, a media firm run by Romney's top advisors, to produce and place television spots. The campaign spent $2.1 million on payroll and $1.3 million on telemarketing.

Although the GOP candidate was outgunned on television by Obama, the pro-Romney super PAC Restore Our Future helped make up the difference, spending more than $8 million on ads touting his candidacy.

After raising a record $20.6 million in June with the help of mega-donor Sheldon Adelson, Restore Our Future brought in $7.4 million in contributions last month. The biggest donor: Houston home builder Bob Perry, who donated $2 million — bringing his total donations to the super PAC to $8 million.

The Renco Group, the holding company of billionaire GOP donor Ira Rennert, shelled out $1 million. The Larry H. Miller Group of Sandy, Utah, gave $787,000, bringing its total to nearly $1 million. The company, named after its late founder, owns auto dealerships, sports teams and other interests.

Another $350,000 came from the Miami-based United Capital Holdings Corp., a company controlled by members of the Poma family, wealthy Salvadoran entrepreneurs who were some of the first investors in Bain Capital, the private equity firm formerly run by Romney.

The donation was recorded July 19, the same day the Los Angeles Times published a report noting that the Pomas were among the wealthy foreigners who made up a third of Bain's first $37-million fund.

For its part, Priorities USA Action, the pro-Obama super PAC, brought in nearly $4.8 million last month and spent $2.5 million on media.

New York computational biochemist David E. Shaw, appointed by Obama to the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, donated $500,000. Anne Cox Chambers, the Atlanta media doyenne whose father founded Cox Enterprises, contributed another $500,000. And Clifford Burnstein of New York, manager of the rock bands Metallica and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, gave $100,000.

Priorities' biggest donor was Mel Heifetz, a Philadelphia real estate investor and gay rights advocate, who contributed $1 million.

 Squigsquasher wrote:
Go play some TF2: Mann Vs Machine.

 azazel the cat wrote:
I don't get it.

cptbravo wrote:
You do realize that the "you didn't build that" argument is perfectly valid if you pay attention to more of it than that one line right?

I mean its perfectly acceptable to use a teleprompter in my opinion, but it saddens me that no one really writes much of they're own stuff anymore.

We need a new Teddy Roosevelt. He wrote almost all of his speeches, plus was a bad ass. And his political views would be great for right now, granted a couple of changes would be needed, but still.

 whembly wrote:

cptbravo wrote:You do realize that the "you didn't build that" argument is perfectly valid if you pay attention to more of it than that one line right?

The full context of that line is even worse...

 d-usa wrote:

 whembly wrote:

cptbravo wrote:You do realize that the "you didn't build that" argument is perfectly valid if you pay attention to more of it than that one line right?

The full context of that line is even worse...

Still valid though.

At least just as valid as saying "you didn't win that..." after this election, "...somebody bought it for you".

/trying to bring thread back on topic

 d-usa wrote:
Well, pure on topic would probably be (R) has too much moniez.

But I think "Politics haz too moniez" is also acceptable.

 whembly wrote:


What's the problem again? Oh... right... (R) haz too much moniez!!!!

amirite??

cptbravo wrote:
You do realize that the "you didn't build that" argument is perfectly valid if you pay attention to more of it than that one line right? I mean its perfectly acceptable to use a teleprompter in my opinion, but it saddens me that no one really writes much of they're own stuff anymore.

We need a new Teddy Roosevelt.

 AustonT wrote:

 whembly wrote:
The monetary advantage in this article is monthly certainly not cumulative. From the primary to now Romney has spent about 163M and raised 193M. Obama has spent 262M of the 348M he has raised. I havent seen solid numbers on the totals spent by those associated with each candidate, but I have little doubt when this shakes out the Obama campaign and allies will outspend the Romney Campaign and allies by a considerable margin. All told including the various local to federal elections something like 5.8B dollars will be spent this year. Something like 2.5B of that on the presidential election. Compared to 5.4/2.9B in 2008 (to be fair there were two hotly contested primaries for both parties).

The article also seems indifferent to the restrictions on receiving and spending funds before the primaries have technically concluded at the two conventions. I agree that Obama should end this campaign well ahead of Romney, though the SuperPAC's will make determining that for sure a largely subjective exercise.

whembly wrote:

cptbravo wrote:You do realize that the "you didn't build that" argument is perfectly valid if you pay attention to more of it than that one line right?

The full context of that line is even worse...

Shadowseer_Kim wrote:Talk about Teddy Rosevelt? Really?!! I have no idea why people hold this guy up as so great. He has that rough and tumble image sure, and that counts for something. He was of course a big supporter of Eugenics and a Progressive. I know that is redundant, but too many people forget those two beliefs too often go hand in hand.[/tinfoil hat]

A University of Colorado analysis of state-by-state factors leading to the Electoral College selection of every U.S. president since 1980 forecasts that the 2012 winner will be Mitt Romney.

The key is the economy, say political science professors Kenneth Bickers of CU-Boulder and Michael Berry of CU Denver. Their prediction model stresses economic data from the 50 states and the District of Columbia, including both state and national unemployment figures as well as changes in real per capita income, among other factors.

“Based on our forecasting model, it becomes clear that the president is in electoral trouble,” said Bickers, also director of the CU in DC Internship Program.

According to their analysis, President Barack Obama will win 218 votes in the Electoral College, short of the 270 he needs. And though they chiefly focus on the Electoral College, the political scientists predict Romney will win 52.9 percent of the popular vote to Obama’s 47.1 percent, when considering only the two major political parties.

“For the last eight presidential elections, this model has correctly predicted the winner,” said Berry. “The economy has seen some improvement since President Obama took office. What remains to be seen is whether voters will consider the economy in relative or absolute terms. If it’s the former, the president may receive credit for the economy’s trajectory and win a second term. In the latter case, Romney should pick up a number of states Obama won in 2008.”

Their model correctly predicted all elections since 1980, including two years when independent candidates ran strongly, 1980 and 1992. It also correctly predicted the outcome in 2000, when Al Gore received the most popular vote but George W. Bush won the election.

The study will be published this month in PS: Political Science & Politics, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Political Science Association. It will be among about a dozen election prediction models, but one of only two to focus on the Electoral College.

While many forecast models are based on the popular vote, the Electoral College model developed by Bickers and Berry is the only one of its type to include more than one state-level measure of economic conditions.

In addition to state and national unemployment rates, the authors looked at per capita income, which indicates the extent to which people have more or less disposable income. Research shows that these two factors affect the major parties differently: Voters hold Democrats more responsible for unemployment rates while Republicans are held more responsible for per capita income.

Accordingly -- and depending largely on which party is in the White House at the time -- each factor can either help or hurt the major parties disproportionately.

Their results show that “the apparent advantage of being a Democratic candidate and holding the White House disappears when the national unemployment rate hits 5.6 percent,” Berry said. The results indicate, according to Bickers, “that the incumbency advantage enjoyed by President Obama, though statistically significant, is not great enough to offset high rates of unemployment currently experienced in many of the states.”

In an examination of other factors, the authors found that none of the following had any statistically significant effect on whether a state ultimately went for a particular candidate: The location of a party’s national convention; the home state of the vice president; or the partisanship of state governors.

In 2012, “What is striking about our state-level economic indicator forecast is the expectation that Obama will lose almost all of the states currently considered as swing states, including North Carolina, Virginia, New Hampshire, Colorado, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Florida,” Bickers said.

In Colorado, which went for Obama in 2008, the model predicts that Romney will receive 51.9 percent of the vote to Obama’s 48.1 percent, again with only the two major parties considered.

The authors also provided caveats. Factors they said may affect their prediction include the timeframe of the economic data used in the study and close tallies in certain states. The current data was taken five months in advance of the Nov. 6 election and they plan to update it with more current economic data in September. A second factor is that states very close to a 50-50 split may fall an unexpected direction.

“As scholars and pundits well know, each election has unique elements that could lead one or more states to behave in ways in a particular election that the model is unable to correctly predict,” Berry said.

Election prediction models “suggest that presidential elections are about big things and the stewardship of the national economy,” Bickers said. “It’s not about gaffes, political commercials or day-to-day campaign tactics. I find that heartening for our democracy.”