In boost to campaign, Obama takes in $181 million

President Barack Obama raised $181 million in September, his campaign said Saturday, in a huge boost for his re-election bid following a limp debate performance against White House rival Mitt Romney. The haul was the biggest monthly cash take by Obama of the 2012 race, and was revealed just a day after supporters disappointed by the debate got another fillip with news that the US unemployment rate dipped below eight percent. It means Obama will have ample money to splash on an advertising blitz in the countdown to the election, exactly a month away on November 6, and with 1.8 million donors in the month is an impressive display of grass roots muscle. Republican nominee Romney has yet to reveal his monthly fundraising figures for September, but early predictions that he would outspend Obama by a distance appear to have been unfounded. Romney however does have the support of an array of SuperPAC independent fundraising committees financed by rich donors and corporations, that can spend unlimited sums to attack Obama and outnumber similar Democratic organizations. Obama\'s campaign manager Jim Messina alerted supporters to the fundraising coup for the re-election effort and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in an email on Saturday morning. \"I have some huge news, and I want you to be the first to hear about it,\" Messina said. \"We not only surpassed 10 million donations so far in 2012 to the campaign and the Democratic Party -- a historic record for grassroots politics. \"We also raised $181 million in September from 1.8 million Americans -- more than 567,000 of whom gave for the first time. That\'s by far our biggest month yet.\" Messina said the average donation was $53 and 98 percent of contributions amounted to $250 or less and also boasted that the Obama political machine was in full swing ahead of the election. The September figure was just short of the $193 million piled up by Obama and the DNC in the equivalent month of the 2008 election campaign. He said the campaign opened its 100th field offices in both Ohio and Florida last month and last week registered 10,000 voters in Florida in a single day. In early voting in Iowa, Messina said that 105,000 people had already cast ballots, 62 percent of whom were Democrats. The release of the fundraising figure came on the second successive morning of good news for the Obama campaign after the president was comprehensively outfoxed by Romney on Thursday in the first of three head-to-head debates. On Friday, new Labor Department data showed that the unemployment rate had dropped to 7.8 percent, the lowest level since the president walked into the Oval Office in January 2009. Obama seized on the news to rebut Romney\'s criticisms of his economic strategy and warned that after having come so far, America could not afford to go back to Republican economic policies that had triggered a crisis. But in his weekly radio address Saturday, Obama acknowledged that too many Americans were \"still looking for work or struggling to pay the bills\" and urged Congress to act to alleviate their plight. He said lawmakers needed to extend tax cuts adopted under former President George W. Bush for the overwhelming majority of working American. The tax cuts are due to expire at the end of the year. Romney, banking on a turnaround in the polls after the debate in Denver, claimed Friday that the Obama economy was not in a \"real recovery.\" \"If not for all the people who have simply dropped out of the labor force, the real unemployment rate would be closer to 11 percent,\" the Republican challenger said as he stumped for votes in the battleground state of Virginia. Romney was Saturday in another vital state Florida, practicing for the next debate showdown with Obama on October 16. Obama was off the trail, but he will head out on a campaign and fundraising swing through California on Sunday. Poll watchers were meanwhile keeping an eye on new opinion surveys to gauge if Romney had cut into the narrow lead held by Obama in the national race and in key battleground states. The full impact of the debate and the jobs figures are not likely to be felt in surveys until the middle of next week, though there was signs in some early polls that Romney had made headway in Virginia. The two campaigns meanwhile took their latest hits at one another in new advertising, with the Obama team accusing Romney of being \"dishonest\" in the Denver debate on his true taxation plans. Romney\'s punch meanwhile featured a woman called Melanie McNamara who said she voted for Obama in 2008 but was now going Republican because she believed the former Massachusetts governor was the best bet to restore prosperity.