Updating The Ex-Mitt Club
Through the end of January, 39% of high-dollar early donors to Mitt Romney's 2008 campaign have contributed to him this time around -- up from the dismal 30% through September, when I wrote about this phenomenon, but still pretty dismal.
The figure is for individuals who contributed $1800 or more (within $500 of the maximum at the time) in the first quarter of 2007 -- of those individuals (a little over 7000), 39% have given at all to Romney in this campaign -- well, at least $200, which is the minimum to be listed on the campaign-finance reports.
I don't have fully updated figures for the rest of the 2008 cycle donors yet, but I can tell you that these earliest, first-quarter '07 donors are still by far the most likely to have re-upped this time. And yet, as the number shows, even among those earliest, most avid Romney '08 supporters, well under half have given to him this time.
It's increasingly obvious where the biggest problem is: Utah. Second only to California in the number of these early big donors from '07, just 28% of those Utahans have re-upped with Romney this time.
If there was a huge flood of them holding back just because of Jon Huntsman, there wasn't much evidence of it bursting forth after Huntsman dropped out and endorsed Romney on January 16th. We'll see if it shows up in the February contributions.
Noteworthy that the figure is also 28% for Idaho, and 23% for Nevada. I think this is largely about the extended Mormon networks happily contributing last time, and saying no this time.
On the plus side, he's up to 45% of those early Massachusetts donors. New York (46%) and Connecticut (52%) are coming around. He's up to 47% with his early Texas donors, probably thanks more to GHWBush than Perry dropping out. His home state of Michigan is still a little low, at 41%, as is Florida at 40%. And California, at 36%, is a major weak point, but I need to sort that to see how that breaks out by Bay Area vs. SoCal.