Money surges to Iowa winners

NY Times:

Victories by Senator Barack Obama and Mike Huckabee in Iowa have not only upset political calculations, they have also upset the money game and spurred a growing flood of donations for these candidates while making fund-raising trickier for the rest.

Mr. Huckabee, a former Republican governor of Arkansas who ran a campaign with minimal resources, now finds more money flowing his way. As he jetted to New Hampshire from Iowa, money began to show up, click by click over the Internet — a total of $350,000 by the time he had landed at dawn. By Thursday, the campaign hopes to have an online total of $1 million in fresh cash.

The one-day surge comes on top of a rise in donations that has coincided with Mr. Huckabee’s improving political fortunes. In the last quarter of 2007, as his campaign began to take off, Mr. Huckabee took in $5 million, after raising $2.3 million in the first nine months of the year. Mr. Huckabee has scheduled fund-raisers in Texas and Florida, and his campaign has said it is getting so many requests from supporters to hold fund-raisers that it cannot schedule them all.

“I have a feeling that after tonight,” Mr. Huckabee said on Fox News on the night of his Iowa victory, “we’re going to see a huge surge in fund-raising because up until now, people said, ‘Well, we would give to you but we’re not sure you can win.’ Now they’re thinking, he already has, and he is winning.”

That thought was echoed by one of his major fund-raisers, Bill Schwyhart. “Once they started to believe that Huckabee could go all the way, they began to support him with their checkbooks,” said Mr. Schwyhart, an Arkansas real estate developer. “A lot of people don’t want to reach deep until they are sure a candidate has a chance.”

Yet the dollars rolling into the Huckabee campaign — which has a goal of having $3 million in cash on hand this month — are small change by the standards of a presidential race and no match for the enormous amounts raised by the Giuliani and Romney campaigns, or by the leading Democrats.

...

Those who view campaign donations as an investment or at least protection money in the case of the Democrats will continue to look for the winner and if they don't get a ticket on the main train they will settle for a ticket on the caboose. Huckabee's problem is that $3 million want last long in ad buys in the big states. His problem is compounded by the compression of the schedule which does not give him much time to build a war chest. Still he has come a long way with very little money and done better than those with much more. Ron Paul is proof that the ability top raise money does not necessarily translate into votes.