Far from clarifying things, last week’s first-quarter record fundraising totals in the 2008 presidential campaign dispelled the air of inevitability that the early front-runners – Democratic Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona – spent years trying to create.
Now, enough doubt surrounds each of the leading challengers to prevent any from breaking loose and emerging as the one to beat.
And enough questions remain about the contours of the race – including which states will vote on which dates – that the only certainty appears to be many more months of grind-it-out campaigning.
“A year ago, there was a clear Clinton scenario, a clear McCain scenario” for winning their respective party nominations, said Stuart Rothenberg, publisher of a nonpartisan campaign newsletter in Washington. “…Now, it’s clear other candidates have caught the public’s attention, caught donors’ attention. The result is a pair of races that are both very, very competitive.”
The 2008 contest always promised to be fierce, with no president or vice president running for the first time in decades. More than a dozen candidates are vying on both sides, and together they have raised about $130 million in the first three months of the year, more than ever.
What has surprised longtime political observers is the early engagement of voters.
In a national poll released last week by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center, about half those surveyed said they were closely following news of the presidential campaign, compared with 27 percent at about this point in the 2004 campaign. Much of the interest comes from Democrats, who were more likely to be following campaign coverage, according to the Pew survey.
“There’s a lot of anger” among Democrats and a greater level of dissatisfaction with the direction of the country among voters in general, said Michael Dimock, Pew’s associate director.
There are other signs that, at least for now, the hunger for change is helping Democrats. In Iowa, New Hampshire and other early-voting states, Democratic candidates – and not just the front-runners – have been drawing unusually large crowds, typically outnumbering those for the Republican hopefuls.
Another benchmark is the money raised by the two sides. For the first time since careful record keeping began in the 1970s, the field of Democratic presidential hopefuls collectively out-raised the Republicans, by about $80 million to $50 million in the first quarter of the year.
The picture on the GOP side is more complicated as a result of McCain’s third-place finish in the initial round of fundraising.
