DES MOINES, July 3 — Two more Republican presidential candidates disclosed new fund-raising totals on Tuesday that underscored the tough political environment for their party and the big money advantage that the Democrats have built.
Former Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, who led the Republican field in money raised in the first three months of the year, said donations to his primary campaign had dropped by a third in the second quarter, to $14 million from $20.5 million. Mr. Romney lent his campaign another $6.5 million out of his personal fortune to soften the impact of the decline in donations.
Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former New York mayor, raised more in the second quarter than he did in the first: $17 million including $2 million that he can use only if he wins the Republican nomination, versus about $15 million. But unlike the first quarter, when his fund-raising operation was just getting up and running, his campaign was fully operational in the second quarter.
And while his performance from April through June put him in first place among Republicans, Mr. Giuliani trailed substantially behind the record sums raised by two Democrats, Senators Barack Obama of Illinois and Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York. Mr. Obama raised a total of $32.5 million in the second quarter, and Mrs. Clinton about $27 million.
Mr. Romney and Mr. Giuliani released the figures a day after Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, reported that he raised less money in the second quarter than in the first, and said he would slash the size of his staff and focus his campaign on a few early voting states.
Put together, the results for the three leading Republicans amounted to a stark indication of a gap in enthusiasm and confidence between the two parties, driven in part by President Bush’s low approval ratings, the war in Iraq and the failure of any of the Republican candidates to emerge as a clear front-runner, strategists in both parties said.
The top three Democrats, including former Senator John Edwards of North Carolina, raised $68.5 million over the past three months, compared with $48.7 million for the top three Republicans, according to the reports. Since the start of the year, the Democrats raised nearly 50 percent more than the Republicans, $144.3 million compared with $101.7 million. That includes money that the candidates can use in the primary and in the general election.
Historically, the second-quarter receipts tend to grow for presidential candidates as donors get more involved and take sides in the race. Aides to the Republican candidates — as well as Republicans not involved in the race — said that this year might be an anomaly because the campaign had gotten so intense so early, but they nonetheless expressed deep concern at the reports and what it said about the health of their party.
“It’s a combination of the president’s historically low approval rating and the overall state of affairs in Washington that is demoralizing Republicans and energizing Democrats,” said Scott Reed, who managed the 1996 Republican presidential campaign of Senator Bob Dole of Kansas. “It doesn’t mean it’ll make it all the way to 2008 Election Day, but that sure is the climate we are in now.”
There is a lot of factors playing against the GOP candidates here on the money issue. The biggest factor here is, of course, President Bush. When you have almost 70 percent of the American public believing that the country is on the wrong track, There is really nothing that these GOP candidates can say to the American voters in order to convince them to vote for another Republican into office. And right now, the Republican candidates are taking hard-lined conservative positions on the issues in order to court their own conservative base, even as an overwhelming majority of Americans disapprove of the job performance of the current, hard-lined conservative sitting in the White House. In one sense, I wonder if I'm looking at the self-destruction of this current, neoconservative Republican Party?
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