WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama has shored up support from midlevel donors in some of the most economically distraught areas of the country, even as his Republican challengers have made jobs a central issue.
An Associated Press analysis of Obama’s fundraising since April found his supporters opened their wallets more often this election cycle in places with the worst unemployment rates. That is compared with the same period four years ago.
The new numbers suggest GOP candidates will have to make a harder sell on the gravity of the nation’s 9.1 percent unemployment rate.
Obama reported last week that his campaign and the Democratic Party raised a combined $70 million for his re-election bid. Republican contenders raised a total of roughly $52 million, with Texas Gov. Rick Perry and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney sitting on four times as much cash as the rest of the field combined.
Among Obama’s supporters, there has been an uptick in donations from Democratic- and Republican-leaning counties, even as more than one in 10 people are out of work in those places.
In Detroit, where unemployment exceeds 14 percent, supporters wrote hundreds more checks — albeit in smaller amounts when adjusting for inflation — to Obama’s campaign than in the same period in 2007.
Meanwhile, reports show Herman Cain, a former pizza executive, had $1.3 million in the bank and nearly $700,000 in debt at the end of last month. But Cain says his campaign has raised an additional $2 million over the past two weeks. “Our fundraising is now beginning to pick up,” he said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
