Sorry Mitt, I'm Calling Your Bluff [UPDATE]

The Politico's Jonathan Martin posts a breakdown of Mitt's numbers, as claimed by the campaign. If you look beyond the claim, the numbers just don't add up.

Total Raised for the quarter: $23, 434, 634
Total Disbursements: $11, 570, 981
Money Raised Online: $7, 206, 216
Total Donors: 32,074
Itemized ($200+) donors: 12,236 (38%)
Non-itemized donors: 19,838 (62%)

The Hotline breaks that online number down further.

$3,365,625.59 in pure and simple website fundraising, and
$3,840,591.00 raised through Quick ComMitt, our online fundraising pledge entry tool

The average online gift for both the Bush campaign and the Kerry campaign (and most of this year's contenders) has been in the range of about $100, but let's be generous and say that could go as high as $150. That puts the number of online donors at somewhere between 22,430 and 33,656 donors. We know it wasn't 33,656 because he only has 32,074 total donors. If we assume it was 22,430 people giving an average of $150, that means the remaining 9,644 made an average gift of $2,081.

If 19,838 people gave him less than $200 (let's assume it was $1 less for purposes of giving him the benefit of the doubt), that would preclude the 22,430 $150 donations. That also means a maximum of $3,947,762 out of $23 million consisted of small dollar donations.

If you assume the overwhelming majority of of the $3,365,625 in "pure and simple" online fundraising was small dollar donations (which you have to because it takes a lot of $25 contributions to balance $2,300 to get a $100 average), Romney would have to have the most successful Internet fundraising effort ever run by anyone (including Democrats), together with the worst direct mail and telemarketing campaign in the history of politics. (Telemarketing and direct mail donors are typically small dollar gifts) There is no way that number represents "pure and simple" website giving. The math just doesn't support the claim.

The campaign is using SiteCatalyst to track it's web traffic. If they really want me to buy that number, they're going to have to show me the unique visitor report that supports their online claims. On the Bush campaign, the ratio of unique visitors to donations worked out to about 100 to 1. From our calculations, Kerry was probably around the same.

If for every 100 visitors, you receive one online contribution. To generate the 22,430 donations, they would have to have a minimum of 22,430,000 (see note below) 2,243,000 visitors through their site in the last 90 days. That works out to about 25,000 unique visitors per day. Given their Alexa rank of 101,590, I also don't see that they they may not have the traffic to sustain their numbers.

Some other numbers to keep in mind:

Obama, 50,000 online donors, $6.9 million
Edwards, 30,000 online donors, over $3 million online
Clinton, probably around 30,000 online donors, $4.2 million online

Romney, with a number of total donors that is on par with or less than the "online donors" of the three Democrats raised more than all of them online? I doubt it.

More likely, the campaign is driving their large donors and event attendees to give via credit card on the website in order to pad the online number. They could still claim that as "website fundraising" and keep it and the COMMitt fundraising separate. It's likely that the average gift was astronomically high, meaning there is almost no chance this is a "grassroots outpouring" in favor of Romney. (which is confirmed by the very skewed ratio of donors to dollars raised)

This is a large dollar candidate, not an Internet candidate. No matter how you cook the books, Mitt, that dog doesn't hunt, either.

Update: Patrick Sherrill wrote into our feedback line and pointed out an error in my math regarding Mitt's traffic stats ane the ratio of visitors to donors. I've update that and adjusted the argument slightly. Their traffic rank versus the number of people through the site would have been way ot of proportion using the bad math, but may or may not be terribly out of proportion with the corrected numbers.

Further, as I tried to make clear in this post, I have been contacted by people who think it may be perfectly legitimate for Mitt's team to move the goal posts when it comes to a definition of "online contributions". The responses to that second post seem to agree.

One person made a particularly salient point.
You seem to be skeptical of the $3.4 million in pure and simple online contributions to Mitt Romney because from what I glean, you only count low dollar donations from walk-in traffic as pure and simple contributions....

I'm not sure, but it seems you want to get to the bottom of what "pure and simple" means. I don't know how you do that. We all agree that Obama has superb online tools for his supporters to recruit new supporters and donors. He has a "My Fundraisers" section that empowers the grassroots to solicit contributions from others and get credit for it. Are you going to tell me that those fundraisers only use email or the online tools to raise money from their friends, family, colleagues? They don't. They raise it however they can -- through the phone, on the ground, etc. However, if new contributors are going online and making a contribution after being asked, they are still a new grassroots supporter. The Obama campaign is still using the power of grassroots and harnessing Internet technology to build the most expansive grassroots network and raise the most money they can...

If your goal is to show really impressive grassroots momentum, the donor base should be larger and the average gift smaller, I can't argue that. However, it's not a secret that the first quarter is the time to pick low hanging fruit - supporters who also were generally higher dollar contributors - but that's the case for all of the candidates.
That's a legitimate argument, and I will acknowledge that this post, as originally written, ascribed to Romney more nefarious motives than may actually exist.