One more way Romney is looking screwed.

[sofa king]

Benjy Sarlin over at Talking Points Memo has posted a couple of graphs that show something interesting. You should look at them there:

http://2012.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/02/romneys-fundraising-woes-in-two-charts.php?ref=fpblg

According to that article, 67% of Mitt Romney's campaign money has come from "maximum donors," those who have shoveled over the federal limit of $2500 and who cannot legally contribute directly to the Romney campaign again.

The total amount Romney has raised is $62.8 million. Of that, $42 million has come from donors who are maxed out (only $6.4 million came in sub-$200 donations).

That should mean that the vast majority of Romney's money has come from only 16,830 donors.

There are around three million Americans who are so fabulously wealthy that I am counting them among "the one percent." They have the potential to donate $7.5 billion to the Romney campaign.

If we assume that all of those max contributions came from the 1%ers (and unfortunately for some fools out there, that almost certainly isn't true), then we can estimate Romney's "market penetration" among the super-wealthy is....

0.56%

Zero point five six percent. At best. His "market penetration" among all other donors is, frankly, insignificant.

Just for fun let's run the same numbers on President Obama. Using similar math I'm guessing that the vast majority of contributions to President Obama came from at least 318,000 unique donors who gave less than $200 (in reality, probably many times that number). Their total contribution of $63.7 million just happens to be about $1 million more than everything Romney has earned from all donors, and twenty million more than the 1% have given to Romney. (President Obama has also bagged another $42 million from contributors who gave more than $200; less than 20% of his war chest came from max contributors.)

President Obama's "market penetration" among everyone else is easily rounded off at about 0.1%. If all of the President's max contributions of $2500 (around $18 million total, I'm guessing from those charts) came from 1%ers, my best guess is that they number 7,200, still on the same order of magnitude as Mitt Romney. Romney's "market penetration" among everyone else is most easily rounded off to zero.

In other words, President Obama seems to be pulling in about 40% of the donations Romney is gaining from very wealthy people, but he's pulling in something like 80% or more of the donations from everyone else. Contributions from rich people count for basically none of the votes. President Obama already has enough unique contributors to win Montana's electoral votes, and since you can count a contribution as a virtual guarantee of that donor showing up on election day, it's looking even better.

Last month Romney blew nearly three dollars for every one he took in. It's looking like it's only a matter of time before he needs to dig into his own $200 million in assets. Which means that ultimately, Mitt Romney is going to pay a lot of his own money to look like a chump.

[grantcart]

1. After this week his campaign is going to start having real cash problems.

His PAC can continue to tap out the big check writers, but his campaign still has to raise money.

As you point out Romney doesn't raise money from ordinary Republicans and his main donors have the percentage of donors who have already maxed out.

It is possible that when he reaches Super Tuesday the camp will be on fumes while the PAC will be buying all of the ads, but the question is how much longer will the fat fat cats be willing to write checks for a losing cause.

And then there is the question of spending more than you are raising, just waiting for Gingrich to roast him on running an 'insolvent campaign'.