Report: Romney campaign sets $800 million fundraising goal

Mitt Romney's campaign believes it will need to raise some $800 million to compete with President Obama this November, according to internal memos obtained by The New York Times.

In addition to those funds, the campaign believes another $200 million will be spent by outside super-PACs in support of a Romney candidacy, projecting more than a billion dollars spent in total on the 2012 race — by Republicans alone, according to the report.

As to where the money will come from, Romney's aides believe they can collect more than half a billion dollars from donations to Romney Victory, a joint fund with the Republican National Committee targeting high-dollar donors, who can give over $75,000 apiece.

The campaign also hopes to raise an additional $300 million from smaller donations. That grassroots support has thus far proven difficult for the Romney campaign, especially relative to other Republican presidential candidates and Obama.

According to the memo, Romney's $800 million goal includes some $86 million already raised by the Romney campaign through the primary. Based on previously announced fundraising totals and election filings, that suggests the Romney campaign has raised more than $10 million in March. The RNC raised an additional $13.7 million that month.

But that combined total lags behind the $53 million raised by Obama and the Democratic National Committee over the same period. The Obama campaign also boasted that more than half a million people donated to the campaign in March, with an average contribution of just over $50 — a promising sign for the president, who can continue to go back to those same small donors as the campaign progresses. 

Republicans have predicted that the president will also fundraise some $1 billion throughout the campaign, although the president's campaign team has repeatedly downplayed that figure. 

"People have speculated that this is a billion-dollar campaign. That's bulls--t. We don't take PAC money, unlike our opponents," campaign manager Jim Messina said in a video to supporters. "We fund this campaign in contributions of three dollars or five dollars or whatever you can do to help us expand the map, to put more people on the ground, to build a real grassroots campaign that is going to be the difference between winning and losing."

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