Q2 Fundraising Roundup

• CA-18: After a surprisingly strong $95K first quarter, Kumar has put up somewhat weaker numbers. Meanwhile, Eshoo seems to have been spooked by the viability of Kumar’s campaign and has more than doubled her fundraising. This is looking a lot less like the story the Q1 numbers painted of Kumar sneaking up on her.

• CA-15: Eric Swalwell spent 6 years stockpiling up $1.6 million. Then he lit at least $600,000 of it on fire for a presidential campaign that lasted two entire months. Now his cash on hand in under a million dollars (less whatever he spent in the final week of his campaign). This could be an opening for Aisha Wahab, but we were hoping she’d be able to collect more than that $56K, especially in the expensive Bay Area. Not quite a death knell for her campaign, but not a great start.

• CO-01: This race is a little weird, because it really seems like both candidates should be raising more. In other contexts, Cristana Duran’s $80K would be worrisome for a former speaker of the Colorado House, but Diana DeGette, despite being a longtime member of Congress and being well aware that she had a serious challenger, only raised $207K. Generally speaking, a low budget race for a constituency of this size would favor the incumbent, but DeGette isn’t especially well known.

• GA-13: Michael Owens raised roughly $20,000 in the second quarter. That is shockingly low for someone in his position. He was recently the Democratic Party chair of a large purple county (Cobb) during a blue wave year, and is dating state Rep. Brenda Lopez Romero, herself a candidate for Congress in Georgia’s 7th district. Some politicians are bad fundraisers - they don’t know how to sweet talk donors (or don’t have the desire to), they have a bad fundraising team, or some other issue. But even the worst fundraisers can scrounge up some money if they have the connections and they’re trying. We know Owens has the connections. It’s looking like he’s not trying to fundraise for his own Congressional bid.

  He might not be the only opposition to Scott for long. A couple months ago, it was reported that former East Point mayor and current staffer to Atlanta mayor Keisha Bottoms, Jannquell Peters, was considering a run for the seat. She announced on Sunday that she had formed an exploratory committee for the seat and promised “more to come very soon”. Georgia primaries have runoffs, so there’s no risk to having a crowded field.

  Want to hear something funny about Scott’s fundraising? Of the $233,500 he raised, $228,800 (98.0%) was from organizations like PACs, $4,250 (1.8%) was from people in the financial industry, and only $450 (.2%) was from anywhere else.

• FL-05, MA-04, NY-12: Sometimes interesting candidates just don’t go anywhere, and it looks like we have three clear casualties on that front. Pharmacist Albert Chester raised just $4,000 and self-funded $5,000 in his bid against conservative Democratic Rep. Al Lawson for the Jacksonville- and Tallahassee-based FL-05. Democratic socialist and former financial regulator Ihssane Leckey, a Muslim and an immigrant, raised only $12,000 for her campaign against Rep. Joe Kennedy III in Fall River and suburban Boston’s MA-04. Attorney and former legislative aide Erica Vladimer, who bravely accused then-state Sen. Jeff Klein of sexual misconduct, raised only $10,000 against hawkish anti-vaxxer Rep. Carolyn Maloney in Manhattan and Queens’s NY-12. 

• HI-02: Tulsi Gabbard is roughly in the same place she was last quarter, and Kai Kahele, while not doing quite as well as last time, is still raising enough to put up a serious challenge. Notably, Kahele received donations from Hawaii state rep.San Buenaventura and senator Maile Shimabukuro.

• IL-03: Marie Newman came in again with a second strong quarter, bringing her total for the year up to nearly $540,000. Last cycle, she wouldn’t raise that much money until 2018, a few months before the primary. She’s fundraising at the level of a general election candidate, which is impressive. Unfortunately, it looks like Lipinski learned his lesson after getting outraised last quarter, and has bumped his fundraising up to $363K. 

  More worrying for Newman is Rush Darwish’s total. Darwish quietly entered the race in late May and hasn’t garnered much attention. He has no endorsements and very little social media presence (for instance only 34 followers on Twitter). But now he does have about $133,300 to work with. It’s not clear how well he can keep that up, since most of his money was pledges he’d gotten prior, but even if he doesn’t nearly keep pace with spending or endorsements, even a semi-competent campaign could peel away enough anti-Lipinski voters to let him squeak by with a plurality. Same goes for Abe Matthews, of course, just on a smaller scale.

• IL-07: Kina Collins didn’t raise that much, really: $21K isn’t enough to run a House campaign on, even if it’s for just half a quarter. But Danny Davis isn’t too active a campaigner and his $61K is hardly more than what Collins raised. So maybe, if she can expand on what she’s been doing so far, she could put up a real challenge.

• MD-05: Last time around, we said that Wilkes’s $6K wasn’t a lot of money, but it was raised in one week, so if she could keep up that pace it would be a good sign. Well, she didn’t quite make that pace, but she got close with $46K. There’s a base for a campaign to seriously challenger Hoyer there, but she’s not nearly there yet.

• MA-Sen: Labor lawyer Shannon Liss-Riordan raised $145,000 in just less than three months, which is respectable, but not quite enough to fund a statewide campaign in a state as big as Massachusetts. However, she self-funded a whopping $1 million. Ed Markey is in for a real race. Unless Liss-Riordan is planning on self-funding millions more, she’ll need to pick up the fundraising, though.

• MA-06: Seth Moulton has a ton of money between his two accounts. We knew that already, though. The more surprising news is that Jamie Zahlaway Belsito, a Salem State University trustee appointed by Republican Gov. Charlie Baker, only raised $19K. Now, it’s possible that that’s because she hadn’t officially announced until 6/27, but even if that’s the case, she was collecting donations before that, and this very small total means she won’t be keeping any other challengers out of the race (thankfully).

• MA-08: Not much has changed here since last quarter, or last cycle really. If things don’t change, it looks like Lynch will be able to coast again.

• NM-Sen: DSCC endorsee and NM-03 Rep. Ben Ray Luján pulled in $1.1 million, while Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver only raised $223,000. Toulouse Oliver’s fundraising isn’t bad, but Luján’s is much better--which is a shame, because Toulouse Oliver is running to his left. It was wrong of the DSCC to get involved in an open primary, anyway (especially in a blue state like New Mexico.)

• NM-03: Finally, it’s time to make some sense of this massive field. Valarie Plame, Marco Serna, and Teresa Leger have all established their viability with their fundraising. Rob Apodaca barely raised much of anything, and if he’s planning on self-funding his way to success, he’s going to need a lot more than $66K. Plus, he’s not a known figure to normal voters - he’s mostly just a guy who’s been around behind the scenes in the political world for a while. And then there’s Joe Sanchez, a conservative Democrat in the state house and one of the two candidates we definitely don’t want, along with Plame. He raised only $47K. There’s no excuse of the state house being in session (it wasn’t) or of him getting in later (he was first in). He simply didn’t raise a lot of money, and he’s a freshman in the house who won his primary with a plurality, so it’s not like he’s Diaz Sr. type whose brand can carry him through.

• NY-10: The breakout fundraising star this quarter has to be Lindsey Boylan, who raised a fantastic $265K while no one was watching. Jerry Nadler, with the full support of the Democratic establishment behind him, raised a decent $456K. One interesting point of comparison between Nadler and Boylan’s funding this quarter is that Nadler did not fund his campaign with a single dollar of his own money while Boylan gave her own campaign $84K (on top of the $265K she raised), which is a significant amount for a race this size, especially for a progressive challenger like Boylan who might want to frame her campaign as grassroots. Still, having those resources to get her name out will be big.

• NY-15: Five hundred and twenty two thousand dollars is just an astounding total to collect in a primary race, and Ritchie Torres did it. It’s looking more and more like Torres is the candidate best posed to defeat Rubén Díaz Sr. Blake only raised $121K, which isn’t a lot considering he was the kind of guy who used to brag about his fundraising abilities. Ramos’s $20K suggests a big hole to climb out of. And then, of course, there’s Rubén Díaz Sr, who raised $74K. For most other candidates, that would be a problem. But for Díaz, whose political strength was always in his connections to and popularity amongst fundamentalist religious congregations concentrated in a few areas in the Bronx, it’s unclear how much money would help him anyway.

• NY-16: Eliot Engel raised his usual mediocre amount, but he was never going to be the interesting filing this time around. Instead, let’s turn our attention to the early jockeying to be his progressive alternative. Progressives will have to choose between backing Andom or Jamaal if they don’t want to totally forfeit the race, and an early indicator of strength is fundraising. By that metric, Bowman is clearly out on top, with $76K in a slightly shorter amount of time than Ghebreghiorgis’s $34K.

• OR-04: Activist Doyle Canning raised $37,000 in the period of less than 6 weeks between her filing with the FEC and the end of the quarter. While House Transportation Committee Chair Peter DeFazio has a boatload of cash, raising $37,000 in less than half a quarter isn’t a bad start. OR-04 is a swing district that Trump nearly won, so we’re not going to be covering this race, but we did think the fundraising was worth noting.

• OR-05: Milwaukie Mayor Mark Gamba did not come out of the gate strong, with only $35K raised.If he doesn’t seriously pick it up next quarter, he’s out of the game. Kurt Schrader, Blue Dog extraordinaire, continued to pile up his cash. 

• PA-18: Gerald Dickinson actually released his totals last week, so this isn’t new, but it is something to see that Mike Doyle, never a stellar fundraiser, didn’t seem to think it was worth picking up the pace at all. It’s also possible he didn’t realize that Dickinson would be anything approaching a threat, which—okay, fair, we didn’t either, but we haven’t been an Allegheny County politician for decades who should have a better feel for the local political world.

• TX-28: Jessica Cisneros announced her fundraising last week, so there not a lot new here. Seeing Cuellar top $3 million just reinforces how much corporate money is going to come down on her.