Mitt Romney Raised $100 Million in June
7/5/2012
Kayana Szymczak/Getty Images(BOSTON) -- Mitt Romney’s campaign said Thursday that he raised more than $100 million in June, a record for the candidate so far in the 2012 race. President Obama raised $150 million in September 2008, the most ever hauled in a month.
Mike Allen of Politico broke the news on Twitter after the Romney campaign leaked the June figures.
Obama hasn’t yet announced how much money he raised in June. Typically, campaigns are more eager to leak their fundraising totals when they surpass expectations.
The Obama campaign did, however, accuse Romney of releasing the figure in an effort to change the conversation of the campaign.
“Mitt Romney is trying to distract from a week when he took contradictory positions on the freeloader penalty in the Affordable Care Act and we learned more about his offshored finances in Switzerland, Bermuda and the Cayman Islands,” Obama spokesman Ben LaBolt said in a statement, referring to news reports about Romney’s financial holdings.
Democrats insist that Obama will be the first incumbent in the White House to be outspent in an election.
“With the combination of super PACs and Romney, we will be outspent,” Obama campaign manager Jim Messina told The Atlantic.
While Obama still has strong fundraising power, he has been trailing in the battle of the super PACs, the technically independent appendices of the campaigns that were created in the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling. As of the last filing, Obama’s super PAC had raised short of $15 million, while Romney’s has surpassed $60 million. And that doesn’t include other conservative groups like Karl Rove’s American Crossroads, which had raised almost $35 million, or the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity, which is getting big checks from casino tycoon Sheldon Adelson.
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