It's up over in Breaking Blue, but via Turn Maine Blue we have news of a very strong fundraising quarter for Democratic Congressman Tom Allen, who is challenging faux moderate Republican Senator Susan Collins in Maine this cycle.

I wanted to share some exciting news about the June 30th fundraising deadline with you today.  In my first quarter as an announced candidate for the U.S. Senate, my campaign raised just under $1.1 million.  Nearly 9,000 people contributed to my campaign over the past three months, giving an average contribution of $122.

I could not have done it without you.  We raised more than one-third of our money from you, the netroots community.  Thank you for all of your activism and generosity during this last quarter.  Together, we sent a strong message throughout the political world about the power of the blogosphere and the importance of ending the Iraq War.

The campaign is still tabulating and categorizing some of the donations, but it appears that Allen raised in the ballpark of $300,000 online this quarter, a fairly impressive haul for a Senatorial candidate in a small state. Much of this total came from an extremely successful fundraiser MoveOn held for Allen as Joe Lieberman trekked up to Maine to raise big dollars for Collins, but a good deal also came from blogs raising money for the campaign.

There's no doubt that this is going to be a difficult race for Allen. Despite the fact that Collins often leans far to the right of the image she is able to project through the establishment media, she is still popular in Maine. But Allen is running strong so far, and his ample fundraising effort this quarter will help put him in a position to take the campaign directly at Collins' weaknesses, like continuing to support the unending American military presence in Iraq.

There's more...

Well, this has been a day in which there has been quite a bit of trumpeting of Democratic successes on this site -- so maybe one more post on the subject will do.

According to the Associated Press, Republicans waited until perhaps the quietest news day of the summer -- the day before the Fourth of July -- to allow their embarrassing fundraising numbers to trickle out. And not only are the overall numbers unremarkable, particularly in comparison with the Democrats, the total number of donors to this point in the campaign for the Republicans pales in comparison with that of the Democrats.

For the year, according to the aforementioned AP report, Mitt Romney -- who without $9 million in personal loans to the campaign would be in as dire a financial status as the effectively broke John McCain -- leads the way with 80,000 donors, followed by John McCain at 72,000 donors and Rudy Giuliani with 56,000 donors. There is almost undoubtedly at least some overlap between the three campaigns' donors, but for the sake of generosity, let's say that 208,000 or so people donated to the top three Republicans' campaigns. For comparison's sake, about 258,000 people, or about 25 percent more, have donated to the campaign of Barack Obama alone. John Edwards has reportedly seen roughly 100,000 people donate to his campaign, so his donor base is larger than that of any of the Republican presidential candidates, and though Hillary Clinton has yet to release her second quarter numbers, her campaign reportedly had in the ballpark of 50,000 donors, which would put her nearly even with Giuliani in half of the time.

Going one step further to do a final comparison of numbers of donors for the top three candidates (in terms of fundraising, at the least) for the two parties' presidential nominations, let's assume, for the sake of argument (and I know it's incorrect to make this assumption, but bear with me), that there was no overlap in either the Democrats' donor list or that of the Republicans. Let's also assume (and I also know that this assumption is wrong, but bear with me here, too) that Hillary Clinton did not get a single new donor this quarter. Not a one. These Democrats would have roughly 408,000 donors for the first half of the year while these Republicans would have just 208,000 donors, or just over half as many. That's right: the three leading Democratic candidates for President conceivably have more than twice as many donors as do the three leading Republican candidates. If that's not a shocking comparison, I don't know what is.

There's more...

Todd just put up a post noting that the three leading Democratic candidates for President outraised the three leading Republicans during the second quarter by well over a 50 percent margin. Taking a look at just primary dollars, the Democrats' lead is still remarkably large.

One should note that these numbers come from preliminary media reports rather than from the actual campaign finance filings. What's more, these numbers do not include every Democratic and Republican candidate (there are uneven numbers and not every candidate has yet announced his or her haul). Additionally, Fred Thompson has not yet reported his fundraising, and his absence might -- and I do mean might -- account for the remarkably low numbers for the Republicans overall.

But Todd is completely correct. This is extremely remarkable and unheard of, that the Democratic candidates would have such a large fundraising advantage -- more than 3-to-2 in primary dollars this quarter, in fact -- over their Republican counterparts. We really may be entering a new era of politics, folks, so fasten your seatbelts.

You're reading these numbers first here at MyDD.

During the second quarter, Barack Obama brought in $10.3 million dollars online, or about a third of the $32.5 million he raised overall this quarter. This ups his total online haul for the year to $17.2 million. Both of these online fundraising numbers are very large and indeed are records for this point in the campaign.

Since the beginning of the campaign 110,000 people have given online to the Obama campaign, or more than 40 percent of his donors. For year year, 90 percent of the online donations to the Obama campaign have been in amounts of $100 dollars or less, and a half of the online donations have been in amounts of $25 or less.

We'll get you the numbers for other candidates as they're released, but if you're interested in reading a comparison between online fundraising numbers this cycle versus the previous one, Jerome has a very interesting take. Quickly, Howard Dean raised about $25 million online of the $50 million or so he raised over the course of 2003, so Obama appears to be on pace to top that online fundraising record by a fairly large margin (though Obama's offline contributions make up a larger proportion of his overall fundraising than did Dean's).

There's more...

Hillary's and Obama's $ numbers are important only to the extent that they will both have enough to get their message out.  

The bigger story here is that the Democrats continue to outraise the GOP!

No matter who we choose to support in the primary, this is good news for all of us and our shared goal of having a Democrat back in the Whitehouse.

There's more...