When President Obama and Mitt Romney decided to decline public financing for the general election and raise hundreds of millions of dollars on their own, the upside was clear: No spending limits and effectively unlimited resources to spend taking their message to voters.
But with the election only a few weeks away, the downsides are becoming clearer: All that fund-raising takes time, dragging the candidates away from the campaign trail at critical moments.
Mr. Romney's experience, in particular, may hold one big lesson for future candidates in the new age of unlimited spending: Without a robust base of small donors who give over the Internet, raising all that m oney takes a major commitment of the candidate's of time and energy right at the moment when he may need to be out on the trail courting voters instead of money.
Logistically, online fund-raising requires minimal time and effort from the candidate: no schmoozing with big donors at hourlong dinners, no plane detours to Los Angeles and New York. But Mr. Romney's grass-roots fund-raising is not nearly so robust as Mr. Obama's. In order to match Mr. Obama dollar for dollar, as he intends to, Mr. Romney must therefore spend more time than the president at big donor events, at a time when challengers might traditionally spend more time on the road campaigning.
“I'd far rather be spending my time out in the key swing states campaigning, door to door if necessary, in rallies and various meetings,†Mr. Romney said on Sunday night, during a gaggle with reporters. “But fund-raising is a part of politics when your opponent decides not to l ive by the federal spending limits.â€
Mr. Romney's aides are seeking to shift to a busier schedule in the field, recognizing that Mr. Romney needs more time on the campaign trail if he is to halt what appears to be slowly building momentum, at least in polls, for Mr. Obama, who has taken a small but worrying lead in some swing states after months in which the race had seemed deadlocked.
In a conversation with reporters on Monday, one of Mr. Romney's chief advisers, Ed Gillespie, hinted that the campaign was hoping to bank enough money in the coming days so that Mr. Romney would no longer need to spend as much time courting donors.
“We're going to reach a point here, hopefully soon, where we'll have the resources we need to carry us through Nov. 6 and we won't need to be doing those finance events,†Mr. Gillespie said. “We'll be able to concentrate on being in target states for longer stretches of time, and we'll be able to focus on doing more politic al events than finance events, and we're all looking forward to that period of time.â€
