NORTH COUNTY - Quixotic presidential candidate Duncan Hunter continues to exude optimism despite having raised little money in comparison to his rivals and barely registering in comprehensive polls of voter preferences for the 2008 GOP nomination.

The 58-year-old El Cajon Republican, whose 52nd Congressional District includes portions of North County, is in Iowa this week, delivering his folksy mantra of a strong national defense, secure borders and improved foreign-trade policies.

And while top-tier Republican presidential candidates such as former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Arizona Sen. John McCain are reporting having raised millions in the first three months of the year, Hunter said he is more than satisfied with the comparatively paltry $500,000 he has landed.

"I was outspent by Romney 20-1 in South Carolina but I beat him 2-1 in a straw poll," Hunter said during a telephone interview Tuesday in reference to one of his chief rivals for the mantle as the most conservative of the Republican hopefuls.

In that March 2 poll of 776 GOP voters in the city of Spartanburg, Hunter garnered 158 votes, only four fewer than Giuliani and six fewer than McCain. Romney, who spent tens of thousands on television commercials and other efforts, got 80 votes.

He also won a straw poll of precinct committee officers in Arizona's Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, in January.

A poll released this week by the Field Research Corp. of 1,093 California voters showed Hunter favored by just 4 percent of those questioned. Giuliani led with 36 percent, a 12-point edge over McCain in the poll conducted between March 21-31.

"We're doing fine," said Hunter, who has held his congressional seat for 26 years and is the ranking Republican on the House Armed Services Committee. "We are getting our message out and we don't have a massive payroll for political consultants to tell me what to say because I know what I stand for."

Despite his continuing relative anonymity and in spite of registering 1 percent or less in recent nationwide polls, Hunter frequently appears on national television without having to pay a dime for the air time. CNN's Lou Dobbs, who shares Hunter's views on immigration control and border security, has had him on his show numerous times, and Hunter also has made appearances on the Sunday morning talk shows.

The commercial-free C-SPAN network featured clips of him Sunday meeting recently with small groups of voters in New Hampshire.

Hunter's campaign staff is all-volunteer, and longtime friend Roy Tyler is serving as his communications aide and driver.

His son, Duncan, often does much of the advance work and also serves as his dad's driver and aide. And the 30-year-old younger Hunter also announced last week that he intended to seek the congressional seat his father now holds in 2008.

The Hunter campaign has not filed its first-quarter contribution report with the Federal Election Commission, but Tyler said Tuesday the report due by midmonth will show that the campaign has raised "somewhere north of $500,000."

"For us, we think that is great," Tyler said. "We've had what we've needed and we've got a mailing going out and our telemarketing is up and working - we got $32,000 in pledges on Monday."

Romney raised $23 million in the reporting period while the Giuliani campaign said it took in $15 million. The McCain camp reported raising about $12.5 million.

Despite the upbeat tone from Hunter and his campaign, San Diego State University political professor Carole Kennedy said the effort looks for now as if it destined to stay in the bottom tier among the GOP hopefuls and that Hunter's run will likely end up a distant memory. But Kennedy also lauded Hunter for standing by his convictions.

"I'm sorry, but you need a ton of money to get elected president in the United States and having not done as well as some of the other contenders means it's likely he won't do well in the future," she said.

"At the same time, I do believe he is sincere in his ideological perspective and there is a certain interest within the Republican Party to balance out the more moderate message from the other candidates."

Hunter, she said, "is a media-savvy guy." That media awareness was present again Tuesday as a Fox television crew was on hand to film some of Hunter's meetings with voters in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

Hunter also stressed that it was far too early to count any candidate out and said that he didn't even start raising money until after the first of the year while several other candidates have had fundraising efforts in place for years.

On May 3, Hunter and eight other GOP candidates will take part in a debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley. The event will be broadcast on MSNBC. A second debate will take place six days before California's primary on Feb. 5.

- Contact staff writer Mark Walker at (760) 740-3529 or mlwalker@nctimes.com.