Zero To $3.5 Million In 17 Days

That's the kind of fundraising acceleration performance you can expect when you drive The All-New Reince Priebus.

The Republican National Committee raised $5.7 million in January, and new Chairman Reince Priebus said Sunday that $3.5 million of the total came in after his election Jan. 14.

“We owe a lot of our success to major donors who helped us reach 180 percent of our monthly major donor goal, and we were able to accomplish that in the last two weeks of January,” Priebus said in a statement. “I am thankful for the outpouring of support I’ve seen over the past month, from both long-time and first-time donors, but we have a lot of work to do.”

Priebus has been working to restore confidence among major donors and dig out from under the debt created during the 2010 election cycle. The RNC had $21.4 million in debt and only $2.1 million on hand by the end of the month, according to disclosure forms filed Sunday to the Federal Election Commission.

Because the RNC is still receiving bills from vendors, Priebus said he expects the committee’s debt to be more than $22 million, including $15 million in loans and more than $7 million to vendors.

The Democratic National Committee, meanwhile, raised $7.2 million in January and had $16.8 million in debt, including $15 million in loans taken out during the 2010 election cycle. It had $9.1 million on hand.

Granted, it's hard to do worse than Michael Steele did when your job consists of "Be Republican and have wealthy donors throw money at you without screwing things up" and as far as I can tell for the last month Priebus has completely stayed out of the news as far as "stupid controversies" go.  Already he's a success.

Meanwhile, it's interesting to note that in a post-Citizens United world, both the RNC and DNC are struggling badly with fundraising, are having to take out big loans, and have amassed some $35 million plus in debt between them.

Big donors don't have to deal with either anymore.  They can give directly to candidates now and can give as much as they want to in the final days of elections.  Both sides racked up quite a bit of debt during the 2008 elections too, but not quite as much as 2010, and 2008 was a Presidential election year to boot.

2012 is going to be pretty scary for both organizations, I think.