That table is 2 months old. Thompson had a fund raising windfall immediately post announcement. His staff’s quotes and the behavior of the campaign since show profoundly that the windfall rate of donations did not maintain.
Here is the critical data everyone needs to get their brains wrapped around. THIS is what it costs to run a campaign.
http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/case/3pt/berkovitz.html
and this data is quite a number of years old. But even so if you sit down and project a 30 second spot every 30 minutes (heavy would be every 15 minutes) on multiple target TV audiences the costs soar. Then tack on radio on multiple stations and you’re burning easily $400K/week in just a medium market.
You can then add senior staff salaries to these numbers. They vary by credentials, but pretty much all are well north of six figures annually at that level of play. Then there are the pollsters. Travel expense. Hotel conference room reservations.
Read that media buy table and . . . understand.
I know the majority of us on Free Republic are all idiots Owen, and probably don’t appreciate your brilliant analysis like we should, but I think a lot of us will wait and see about getting a Conservative in office before we give up and move on to a more middle of the road stance....
Let me add once more point here, money-wise. I have seen estimates as high as $500 million required to be raised by a candidate who must go all the way to November. I think that is high. My estimates are lower by about 15%.
So 425 million dollars is to be spent to have any chance of competing to win. The DNC can toss some of that into Hillary’s pile in September. The GOP can’t do that for the GOP nominee.
A reasonable estimate of Romney’s fund raising/spending to date would be about $85 million. That means 340 million to go, just to get into the arena and compete.
New Hampshire early voting started some time ago so we cannot say “not a vote has been cast” yet, but regardless we don’t know what is going to happen other than one particular truth. That is:
Fred Thompson is not going to be President of the United States driving a bus across America while Hillary and her staff of experts are in a leased and repainted B757 hitting every target locale in the nation.