The Barr for President campaign’s website reports that they have raised $201,279 thus far. This is fairly impressive as they were showing only around $185,000 when I looked earlier in the day. It seems that funds are finally starting to roll in at a significant rate.
Helping to fuel the burst of fundraising is probably the email that went out earlier today from the Libertarian Party.
It looks like he raised about $17k in ~24 hours. Chuck Baldwin has raised about twice that for his entire campaign. If Barr can keep up his current pace, he’d finish with close to $3 million raised, if my calculations are correct.
As of approximately 6:08 am (Pacific Time), the Barr campaign website shows $207,549.00 raised. Not too shabby. With 1980 as an aberration (not too many campaigns have a billionaire VP candidate), this may wind up being a banner year in terms of money raised.
What’s funny is everyone in the MSM sarcastically pretends this is a serious number. I don’t think it’d be too much of a stretch to see “Go Broke for Barr” moneybombs on the horizon as he makes an attempt to increase his coffers. If he can reach 60% of the people who’ve voted for Ron Paul, most likely after the Republican Convention, and they all donate $50, he can easily get 30-35 million, but even that won’t be enough to run a national campaign. He’ll have to shoot for at LEAST $75 million. I doubt Russ will make much of an impact at all.
Barr just got nominated a short bit ago. I’m waiting for him to show more than just some web and TV activity, too. Hopefully they’re going to launch something soon. The clock is ticking.
Well, Jeff. More now then ever. To many disenchanted out there that won’t go for the democrat or republican and will go with the Libertarian message over candidate. It was introduced head on from the Paul campaign. I doubt there will be that many Americans that will be won over by a Barr speech, but the central will behind it.
Bob Barr will not raise anywhere near 30 million, because his campaign does not know how to raise that type of money. Look how Nader does it. Mass emails(I get sometimes 3 days), creative ways to get money(we need gas like Nader does), and a lot of campaign stops.
I haven’t seen any of that from Barr. Also, I don’t think he has enough time or the grassroots effort of people spending money like Paul did. Remember, Paul had a database of almost 30yrs where he could count on people, does Barr even come close to that?
Barr will no doubt raise about 6-8 million, but I don’t expect much more than that.
This is one of the sillier things I’ve seen.
What then, does that say about the Libertarian vote for the Browne candidacies and Badnarik?
The way I see it, it doesn’t matter how much he raises. If he does top a million votes, it wouldn’t be because of his campaign. People would have voted for the ideologically of Libertarianism, not this odd Bob feller.
–Susan Hogarth made an excellent point: In order to reach $30 million, Barr would have to raise $200k PER DAY from now until Election Day–
On the other hand, it amounts to $50 each from 600,000 people, which doesn’t seem that outlandish, generally speaking, for a reasonably-successful insurgent campaign. It’s easy to imagine Ron Paul getting that (again), if he ran. Jesse Ventura would excite that level of support. (So would Kane probably, come to think of it.) Whether Barr can reinvent himself convincingly enough to excite anything like that remains to be seen. But in general terms, it’s a pretty reasonable goal, for someone who wants to make a decent showing in the presidential race.
FWIW, he gave the figure as “between 25 and 40 million” in one recent TV interview. Which frankly is the kind of number he *has* to give the major media if he wants to make a play at being taken seriously. He can’t be saying they want to raise 5 or 10 million, even if that’s how it ends up turning out. Those are Nader numbers; Barr is wisely talking in Perot numbers instead.
As far as his current fundraising goes, I think Barr needs to make a much more aggressive effort at reinventing himself, and showing that he’s not that same Bob Barr that many grew to dislike – the moralizing hypocrite, the dour prosecutor, etc. He needs to make the broader freedom/progressive/change constituency understand that he is now a new man, capable of being a leader in that movement.
Incidentally the Colbert Report would be a GREAT place for Barr to do the full mea culpa/reinvention pitch.
He’s raised more than I have, so who am I to judge?
Hell given our past, I would be happy for anything over the $1 Million range.
Susan Hogarth made an excellent point: In order to reach $30 million, Barr would have to raise $200k PER DAY from now until Election Day.
Nice start, but he has a long way to go to reach Ron Paul numbers.