Romney's PAC catching up Sarah PAC on small donor contributions

(Race42012)....Summaries of contributions to PACs are reported on Form 3X page 3. Line 11.a is for contributions from individuals. Line 11.a.i is for contributions over $200. Line 11.a.ii is for contributions $200 and below. Line 11.a.iii is for total contributions from individuals.

First up is the mid-year report for SarahPAC that they just filed this week. Line 11.a.ii (<$200) for her reports 420,458.91. Line 11.a.iii (total individual contributions) reports $732,867.70. That represents a percentage of 57%.

Now take a look at the latest available report from Romney’s “Free and Strong America” PAC. Since his mid-year report has been filed, but not yet posted, we have to make do with his June monthly report, which conveniently reports year-to-date totals. That means that the numbers we are using for SarahPAC is a five month period from February through June, and FnSA_PAC numbers come from a five month period from January through May. It isn’t a perfect match, but close enough for Government work.

Romney reports on Line 11.a.ii (<$200) a total of $399,027.06 year to date, with at total contributions from individuals (Line 11.a.iii) of $1,341,943.24 year to date. A bit of quick math shows a percentage of 30%.Granted that is only about half the ratio of Sarah Palin’s contributions of $200 or less, but it is a far cry from the anemic 9% Nate Sliver proclaims.

Now take a look at the raw figures. Sarah Palin reports a total of $420K of donations of less than $200. Mitt Romney reports a total of $399K of donations of less than $200. That is a difference of $21K or only a 5% difference.

So what conclusions can be drawn from this? When comparing apples to apples or donations to PAC during essentially the same time frame, Mitt Romney attracts practically the same amount of money from “the little guys” as Sarah Palin. More importantly, he also attracts about three times as much from “the big guys” as Palin. So Mitt is doing just fine by the “grassroots”, within spitting distance of Sarah’s actual numbers in fact. Plus he is walking away with the money people.

So it would appear that in the question of “Big Money vs. Small Money”, Romney in the first part of this year is doing just about as good as Sarah Palin with the Small Money, and is running away with the Big Money. As of today, I fail to see a problem for Mitt.