MAPLight.org, a Sunlight Foundation-funded project that “illuminates the connection between money and politics,” released this cute little widget that tracks presidential fundraising totals for any of the major candidates.

Like most of today’s appealing widgets, this one allows you to customize its size, colors, and choose what data to present. I choose the three frontrunners, squeezed the horizontal size a little, and dropped the candidate’s first names.

The data presented isn’t any big surprise to anyone who reads political headlines. With few substantive policy differences between primary opponents, the mainstream media loves the horserace of the Money Primary. Hillary is beating Barack and Edwards, Romney is inching ahead of Guiliani and McCain, and the donkeys are outraising the elephants by a fairly wide margin (thank you, small-dollar online donors!).

I’m curious to see how widely this widget gets picked up. Does anyone (aside from political junkies) actually care about the Money Primary? Will partisans post this as a way to brag about their candidate … or would they rather completely avoid the subject of money? Edwards has been taking Hillary to task for accepting corporate lobbyist donations, and Barack often brags that he hasn’t taken any lobbying money. Does a widget like this round out the story, or just gloss over it?

(PS – The code generator on the Maplight site isn’t quite working … at least not in Safari on OX 10.4.1. If you get broken code, cut and paste the long string of “param value’” code into the “embed src=” code, and close the embed tag. That should fix it … though the formatting is still a little goofy…)