Campaign finance – disclosure day live

12.26pm: Stephen Colbert's Super Pac, Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow, is a real Super Pac that has to file with the FEC just like any other. We learned yesterday that it had raised just over $1m to the end of January – it appended a note to 1.42pm: James Ball has produced this graph showing the donations raised by Barack Obama, and the four main candidates for the Republican nomination. It shows how fundraising goes in cycles throughout the year. 1.13pm: Our reporter James Ball in London has been digging through the filings in search of facts to support the emerging narrative that Obama's funding is made of up of many smaller contributions in contrast to Romney's big corporations. We know that Obama is focusing on bundlers – the elite group of fundraisers who extract maximum personal contributions from their networks of wealthy individuals. But James is finding that the trend continues down the scale, with very large volumes of relatively small contributions to the president's coffers. He writes: I'm looking at donation size for each candidate - in particular what portion of their funds come from small donations (under $50) and what portion comes from big donations (over $2,500). It's proving pretty telling: 26% of Obama's donations (2% of his cash) come from sub-$50 donations. For Romney, it's 7% – and only 0.2% of his cash. See all stories on this topic »

The Guardian