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In less than a week since naming Paul Ryan as his running mate, Mitt Romney and his campaign have seen around $10 million in online donations, which isn't a bad haul, but they're more excited about the 68 percent bump in new donors. The actual figure sent out by the Romney campaign this morning, as noted by Politico's Alexander Burns, is $10,157,947 with the average donation being $81. And these big numbers could continue the narrative of Ryan being a cash cow, as CNN reported on August 14, that Romney raised about $7 million in the first 72 hours of naming Ryan his VP pick. But wait up. Not so fast. Those numbers aren't too impressive considering Romney and the RNC raised about $100 million in July--do the math and divide that by 31, and Romney raised, on average, about $3 million per day that month. Ryan has been on the campaign for six days (though this isn't counting non-online donations) and... well, break out the whiteboard and you can see how this might undercut the campaign's message of Ryan being fundraising machine. We'll have to wait until next month to see the campaign's full numbers and the Ryan-effect—if there is one.

Big-picture: what the Romney campaign wants to tell us all, and what they hope is the case is that their new donor figures--68% of online donations this week were new donors--means people, even if they aren't donating that much, are really excited about Ryan. And campaign money to Romney isn't a big concern at the moment. After all, Mitt Romney hasn't exactly been hurting for money in recent months as evidenced by the July numbers, and he's been out-pacing the president when it comes to fundraising.

Still don't believe us about the $10 million not being that impressive? Fine. But let's look at 2008, when naming Sarah Palin as McCain runningmate raised the McCain campaign $10 million in the first 72 hours according to CNN (that's about half the time that it took Ryan to get that number)--but of course we all know how that turned out.

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