ALBANY - Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Eliot Spitzer are about to provide a dramatic display of front-running, Democratic fundraising clout in New York as they make public their latest financial filings this week.

Spitzer, the state's high-profile attorney general who is running for governor, will report having raised about $9 million in the past six months with about $15 million on hand, according to aides.

Meanwhile, Clinton has been crisscrossing the country - she was in California, Colorado and Idaho over the weekend - pumping ever more money into a re-election campaign account that already had almost $20 million on hand as of the end of March. Money left over can be used for a possible presidential run in 2008 that many expect her to pursue.

“In any political contest, money tends to flow to the front-runner. People like to be with a winner,” said Clinton adviser Howard Wolfson on Monday. “I think you're seeing that in our race and also in the governor's race.”

A mid-June poll from the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, had the former first lady leading former Yonkers Mayor John Spencer, 57 percent to 33 percent, and toping Reagan-era Pentagon official Kathleen Troia “KT” McFarland, 58 percent to 31 percent.

Spencer and McFarland are expected to compete in a Sept. 12 primary for the right to challenge Clinton.

The Quinnipiac poll found Spitzer leading the Republican candidate, former state Assembly Minority Leader John Faso, 66 percent to 20 percent. Spitzer led his potential primary opponent, Nassau County Executive Tom Suozzi, 76 percent to 13 percent, among Democratic voters.

While Faso and Suozzi are expected to report campaign account balances well above the $1 million mark, Spencer and McFarland are both believed to be well under that. A top McFarland adviser recently said she was loaning her campaign $100,000 to tide it over until fundraising improved.

Improving the fundraising performance could be hard for the underdogs, according to one veteran New York political observer.

“It's very hard to run against well-financed, popular people who are ahead in the polls,” said Lee Miringoff, head of Marist College's Institute for Public Opinion. “It does feed on itself.”

As if to underscore that, the Spitzer aides, speaking only on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to make public the information in advance, said the attorney general's report will show he has already spent about $10 million on a continuous statewide television advertising barrage that began in March.

That is an early-in-the-game display his rivals can only dream about.

Faso has been having some success in fundraising since former Massachusetts Gov. Bill Weld dropped out of the race for the New York nomination in the wake of a drubbing by Faso at the state GOP convention early last month. State GOP Chairman Stephen Minarik, a former Weld supporter, is co-hosting a $1,000-a-person fundraiser for Faso in Rochester on Thursday.

But Minarik said Faso is really just getting his fundraising operation into gear and that results will take some time.

“If people are looking for a home run here on the first filing (since mid-January), it's not going to come,” the state party leader said.

Minarik noted, however, that Faso proved in his narrow loss for state comptroller in 2002 that he could raise money - nearly $7 million in that case.

“It's not like a new thing to him,” Minarik said.

McFarland is hosting a $1,000-a-person fundraiser in Manhattan on Thursday featuring former Pentagon colleagues. Aides hope that will bring in more than $200,000.