10:42 a.m. | Updated Mitt Romney and the Republican National Committee easily outraised President Obama and the Democrats in June, pulling in $106.1 million, a substantial increase in Mr. Romney’s fund-raising pace and a sign of the growing competitiveness of the battle for campaign dollars against Mr. Obama, who raised $71 million during the same period.
The campaign did not release a breakdown for how much was raised by Mr. Romney’s campaign, which can accept checks of no larger than $2,500 for the general election, and the Republican National Committee, which can accept checks more than 10 times that size, along with tens of thousands of dollars more per donor that is forwarded to state parties.
The campaign, which raised $76.8 million in May, has said it hopes to raise a total of at least $800 million for the election, a goal that would require Mr. Romney and the Republican National Committee to average roughly $100 million a month in combined fund-raising through Election Day.
“This month’s fund-raising is a statement from voters that they want a change of direction in Washington,” said Spencer Zwick, Mr. Romney’s finance chairman, in a statement.
In an e-mail to supporters, the Obama campaign portrayed the $71 million fund-raising figure as “good news,” but then added: “We still got beat. Handily. Romney
and the RNC pulled in a whopping $106 million.”
For Mr. Obama, the financial disadvantage represents a big turnaround from the position he enjoyed four years ago, in his successful race against Senator John McCain of Arizona.
In that race, Mr. Obama outspent his rival by a two-to-one margin, raising huge sums of money for television commercials and organizing after forgoing the public financing system.
This time, both candidates have shunned public financing in favor of their own fund-raising prowess. And in the last two months, Mr. Romney has easily outraised Mr. Obama.
In the e-mail to supporters, Ann Marie Habershaw, the Obama campaign’s chief operating officer, warned that the impact of the financial situation for the president could be dire.
“If we lose this election, it will be because we didn’t close the gap enough when we had the chance,” she wrote in the e-mail.
The gap is especially striking because it does not count the fund-raising success that conservative groups like Crossroads GPS and Restore our Future, a “super PAC” backing Mr. Romney, have been having in recent months.
The high total for Mr. Romney reflects the rapid unification of the Republican donor establishment around his candidacy after he formally clinched the party’s presidential nomination contest in late May and began devoting much of his schedule to fund-raising events. As the party’s presumptive nominee, Mr. Romney can raise money jointly with the Republican National Committee, extracting far more money from each wealthy donor.
Mr. Obama, as the incumbent, has had a similar fund-raising arrangement in place with the Democratic National Committee for well over a year, allowing him to raise far more money than Mr. Romney in the early months of the campaign. But people with knowledge of Mr. Obama’s fund-raising said that the Democrats were likely to report a lower number for June than the Republicans.
The Romney campaign has said it raised $4.2 million from roughly 42,000 donors in the hours after the Supreme Court upheld Mr. Obama’s landmark health care bill on June 28.