The Howard Dean political boom, which had been simmering during the spring, erupted in mid-July following the publication of the second-quarter fund-raising results of Democratic presidential candidates. It has begun to pay dividends nationally. Mr. Dean, who has been rising in national polls, was the cover boy of both Newsweek and Time last week. In the politically crucial states of Iowa and New Hampshire, the former Vermont governor has been climbing the polling ladder.
In the important “money primary,” Mr. Dean crushed his Democratic opponents in the second-quarter heat. Raising $7.6 million, he smashed expectations. Mr. Dean also benefited from the fact that several of his opponents, including Rep. Dick Gephardt of Missouri and Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina, failed to meet their own low-balled expectations.
Mr. Edwards, whose first-quarter total of $7.4 million led the Democratic pack, raised only $4.5 million, $500,000 less than expected. Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts raised $5.8 million over the latest quarter, compared to $7 million raised during the first quarter. Sen. Joe Lieberman raised $5.1 million, compared to the $3 million he received during the first quarter. (However, Mr. Lieberman has only $4 million in cash on hand; through June he has already spent more than half the money he has raised, in part by hiring his own children as $100,000-a-year fund-raisers.)
Mr. Gephardt limped across the June 30 deadline with a disappointing $3.8 million, well below what he projected both at the beginning and end of the quarter. Florida Sen. Bob Graham raised $2 million during the second quarter, not much more than the $1.5 million collected by Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio. Carol Moseley Braun, who reportedly has begun declining speaking invitations because she cannot afford the airfare, raised $145,000, nearly three times the $55,000 picked up by the Rev. Al Sharpton.
Perhaps the most astonishing Democratic fund-raising statistic during the quarter was the fact that Mr. Dean received contributions from more than 73,000 individuals. That was 70 percent of the total number of contributors to President Bush. The number of Dean contributors more than tripled the 23,000 donors to Mr. Kerry’s campaign, whose arithmetically challenged manager inexplicably told the New York Times: “The question about Dean has never been about the intensity of his support. It’s about the breadth of it.”
More than half — $4 million — of Mr. Dean’s quarterly take came from donors who contributed less than $200. (Mr. Bush raised $3 million from the under-$200 crowd.) Particularly worrisome to Mr. Dean’s Democratic opponents must be the fact that more than 60 percent of his second-quarter receipts will qualify for federal matching funds. That compares to a normal matching rate of 25 percent to 33 percent.
Mr. Lieberman recently predicted that a Dean nomination would be a “ticket to nowhere” that would lead the Democratic Party into “the political wilderness.” Maybe so. But at this stage, the lightly occupied bandwagon of Mr. Lieberman, the 2000 vice presidential nominee, is looking more and more like it is headed toward the same political crash that totaled the 1972 bandwagon of Edmund Muskie, the 1968 Democratic vice presidential nominee.
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