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Does anyone know what the historical trends are for 4th quarter fundraising compared to 2nd and 3rd quarters. Do campaigns generally raise more or less?
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I was tried googling for this info a few minutes ago. I spent a few minutes at the fec page but the quarterly filings from the 2004 primaries appeared to be like 3000 pages.
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It took longer than a few minutes, but there was some 2000 and 2004 data (and a bit of 1996 data) on
http://www.cfinst.org/president
From that, it looks to me that in the 2004 Democratic race, and in the 2000 Republican race, the 4th quarter (actually it's a 4 month period ending in Jan) has higher fundraising than the 3rd quarter. Also, from the data on this website, I was able to confirm the trend of fewer high dollar ($1000+) doners as the campaign progresses. I think that is the part of the lower dollars per quarter over time meme that the MSM picks up on because they are in more contact with people who personally raise huge sums from a small number of people. What they don't consider (because they are journalists, not mathematicians or accountants) is that the small dollar donors increase over time because of the increased exposure to candidates (thanks to the early big time donors). This is all an expected dynamic. Just don't expect MSM reporters to think that clearly. For example, one of the other MSM memes was that there was money sitting on the sideline in the Republican race, and that this money would therefore be waiting for Thompson's arrival. I could see nothing in the data about big donors (or all total donors) that supports this theory.
All that being said, I would have liked to seen more data from 1996 and earlier elections. If someone else would look that up, I'd be greatful. Some caveats to this campaign finance research:
Try to exclude donor money not useable for the primary (though I think this is a 2008 issue only)
Make sure to exclude major transfers from past campaigns (this should only affect the first quarter of a candidate's candidacy and is usually identifiable by looking at "individual donors" vs. total donations.
Lookout for candidates loaning themselves money. The CFI website shows this when they have a column about individual donors vs. total donations. You can see this clearly looking at Romney's data (or Forbes in 2000).
When a candidate is an incumbent (or quasi-incumbent like Gore), the data for them or their competitors if they have one are not likely to be applicable to a wide open contest like you have in both parties this year (or in 2004 with the Democrats or in 2000 with the Republicans).