President Obama’s re-election committees spent more money than they took in during July, newly filed records show.
The $96 million in spending outstripped the $80 million they raised, but it has been used to assemble a 46-state army of 858 staffers and a monthly payroll of $3 million for the Obama campaign alone.
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Despite the deficit spending, the combined funds of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the Obama campaign, tied together with an arrangement called the Obama Victory Fund, had $124 million in the bank on Aug. 1, according to federal disclosure papers filed Monday.
Not all the money that’s no longer in its coffers has been spent, either: The DNC distributed most of the funds it raised off of Mr. Obama’s name to the party’s apparatuses in swing states, where it will come in handy: $1.3 million to Ohio, $1 million to Florida and Virginia, and $900,000 to North Carolina.
The Obama army of workers has steadily been expanding; in May, it had 700 staffers across 44 states and spent $2.6 million. By comparison, the campaign of presumed Republican nominee Mitt Romney has been operating largely out of its headquarters.
The president’s campaign spent $40 million on television ads, and recently bought 600 ads in 20 of the nation’s top 50 markets, chiefly in Ohio, Colorado, Florida, Virginia and Nevada.
The Romney campaign, for its part, has bought 250 ads in 17 of those markets, focusing on Ohio, Florida and Virginia but also Washington, D.C.
The Obama campaign spent $1.5 million on mailings and $363,000 on telemarketing. It also invested heavily in technology, both to court voters and connect with them to obtain donations, including $61,000 to Blue State Digital, a web firm that came out of the Howard Dean presidential campaign.
Mr. Romney and the Republican National Committee have until midnight to file their disclosures, and they have found a way to avoid disclosing much of their cash — by storing it in their equivalent to the Obama Victory Fund, which, unlike Mr. Obama’s files quarterly, not monthly.
But the Romney campaign has said it raised $101 million.
