Pawlenty 2012: First round of PAC fundraising leaned heavily on Minnesota donors

As we noted last week, all that barnstorming that Gov. Tim Pawlenty has been doing in the past few months has paid off handsomely in bottom-line terms. Pawlenty’s Freedom First PAC raised almost $1.3 million in its first three months of existence, a sum that compares very favorably to the fundraising totals of his better-known Republican rivals, Mitt Romney and Sarah Palin, during the same period.

It turns out Pawlenty relied on the folks back home for most of that cash. Over the past few days I’ve been eyeballing the itemized contributions by individuals to Team Pawlenty, and while the results are back-of-envelope figures (the itemized contributions listed on Pawlenty’s report [PDF] aren’t yet in the FEC’s sortable database), they suggest that about 70 percent of the PAC’s individual donors were Minnesotans, and that those Minnesota donors accounted for nearly 80 percent of funds given through itemized individual donations. (A caveat: In counting donation records, I didn’t separate out the entries that were accounting corrections–such as backing out part of one person’s donation and reallocating it to a spouse.)

Freedom First PAC’s fourth quarter 2009 fundraising totaled $1.28 million, all but $140,000 of which came from itemized individual donations. Of just over 500 individual donation records listed in the PAC’s report, around 150 came from outside Minnesota. The out-of-state givers included some 40-plus Illinois residents, and nearly the same number from the Washington D.C. Beltway area (District of Columbia, Virginia, Maryland).  The next-largest out-of-state donor group appears to be Floridians–including, of course, some retired Minnesota snowbirds–with about a dozen contributions. In all, the non-Minnesota donors appear to have kicked in some $250,000 - $275,000.

The Minnesotans who gave comprise a who’s who of business leaders and traditional GOP stalwarts as well as a few relatively new names in big-buck donor circles. Among them:

• Raymond Ames (Ames Construction)
• George Anderson (Crown Electric)
• Brad Anderson (Best Buy)
• Bill Austin (Starkey Labs)
• Doug Baker (Ecolab)
• Rodney Burwell (Burwell Enterprises)
• Bob Cummins (Primera Technology)
• Jack Farrell (Haskells)
• Jeffrey Fetters (Federated Insurance)
• Harold Hamilton (Micro Control Company)
• Stanley Hubbard (Hubbard Broadcasting)
• Harvey Mackay (Mackay Mitchell Envelope Company)
• Don Oren (Dart Transport)
• Richard Schulze (Best Buy)
• Gregg Steinhafel (Target)
• Glen Taylor (Taylor Companies/Timberwolves)
• Bob Ulrich (Target, retired)
• Wheelock Whitney (retired)