Herman Cain Raises Just $2.86 Million In Third Quarter
At the moment, it does not appear that Herman Cain is well situated to capitalize on his recent rise in the polls:
GOP presidential hopeful Herman Cain told a crowd in Tennessee Friday night his campaign brought in $2.8 million between July and September, his campaign confirmed to CNN.
Cain also said the campaign has $1 million of cash on hand for the third fund-raising quarter.
“You see I run this very tight, like a start-up business because that’s my nature as a businessman,” Cain told CNN’s “Erin Burnett OutFront” on Thursday. Cain said there would be no debt reported for the period.
In a release, Cain’s finance chief heralded the numbers.
“We have had a very successful quarter,” Mark Block, COO for Friends of Herman Cain, Inc., said. “Mr. Cain’s message is spreading and attracting supporters all across the country.”
The campaign numbers for Cain, who has risen in the polls in the last few weeks, are being closely watched as a gauge of whether the upstart candidate can sustain his recent momentum and mount a serious fight for the nomination.
In June, Cain had reported that he’d raised about $2.48 million in the second quarter, so this isn’t an much better haul than Cain had brought in when he was a lesser known candidate. In either case, it’s nowhere near the amount of money that Mitt Romney and Rick Perry have raised, and nowhere near enough to finance a first tier campaign for the Presidency.
I just find it funny that the same people who bitched about there being too much money in politics are now making fun of Cain while lauding Obama’s pro-Wall Street fundraising because he has a large war chest.
It’s not a matter of saying “lots of money good, little money bad” in a moral sense. Merely in the sense of “what chance does this person have to reasonably win? The system as it is strongly rewards big fundraisers. That should change, but it’s not going to between now and November, so it’s the reality we all have to deal with.
tl;dr version- Cain’s screwed