Plainfield Rob caught the numbers before I saw them on this one. As he points out compared to John Laesch’s last quarter there’s improvement in John’s $67,000 for the quarter (Laesch raised $22,000 more among other things) - but I can’t see how that will be enough. Beating Jotham Stein’s declining fundraising in the quarter by about $5,500 may give you bragging rights - but not when you’re down hundreds of thousands of dollars to Bill Foster’s donors alone (and that doesn’t include the money Foster himself has donated or loaned to his campaign).
John Laesch deserves a lot of credit for making his case (including in endorsements) - and anything is possible in politics, he could still win - but Bill Foster’s total receipts dominate John’s by more than 10:1 for the primary - and again, Bill is dominating the race even excluding self-financing. Jotham Stein has raised significantly more than Laesch, helped by Stein’s self-financing - but Jotham is in practical terms equally overwhelmed financially by Bill Foster’s campaign to the tune of 6:1 in total receipts. Thinking all the way back to Democrat Linda Chapa LaVia’s public flirtation with running in the 14th District - it was common knowledge (or at least I publicly pointed out) that there could easily be record-breaking spending in this primary. I was right. Neither John Laesch nor Jotham Stein has raised funds competitively in the race despite that knowledge. We’ll see in just a couple weeks whether they’ve found a way to overcome a substantial funding disadvantage. It’s happened before - but not often when the dominant spender has worked at fundraising and campaigning as hard as Bill Foster.
Comments 2
hmm, i can’t think of analogous circumstances where someone was outspent 10-1 and still won, but i suppose it’s theoretically possible.
what is absolutely shocking to me is that the unions that have endorsed laesch — specifically the illinois afl-cio — has given him nothing. i expected a blow-off $1000 contribution. if the union was serious about helping elect laesch, we could have expected a 10k contribution (their standard “we’re serious” hint to their membership). but nothing? wow.
you are clearly more hopeful about the potential for laesch than i am. the only metric we can measure at this point is laesch’s advantage in signs, although i’m pretty sure he’s using his old signs. this is clearly a campaign that is not ready, on so many levels, for a run for congress…
Posted 25 Jan 2008 at 7:06 am ¶Hi bored now,
Thanks for the comment. I’m not too hopeful about John’s prospects - or anyone’s with that kind of deficit - but it isn’t totally impossible either. However, you’re right to call me on the 10-1 thing - I had some vague ideas of who might have overcome such a deficit (Paul Wellstone - but his first race was around 7-1 or Russ Feingold perhaps) - but truthfully I just assumed that some have made it despite their deficit because of campaign scandals, grassroots strength, political divisions with people taking each other out, and perhaps some of the best (and concurrently worst) campaigning ever.
Spurred on by what you wrote I thought about it a bit more and did a Google search that was far from comprehensive - here’s what I’ve got:
- In DuPage the late Democrat Linda Bourke Hilbert won a slot on the DuPage County Board as a placeholder - not campaigning at all. It was, as I understand it, a case of a GOP faction split that led to Linda’s win - the first Democrat to win a DuPage board seat in almost two decades (at the time).
- New Hampshire House seat District 1, Carol Shea-Porter was outspent about 10-1 by Jim Craig in the Democratic Primary - but Carol won.
Carol Shea-Porter Pre-Primary total receipts for cycle $35,751 (Oct quarterly total receipts for cycle $116,176) and Jim Craig Pre-Primary total receipts for cycle $325,665 (Oct quarterly total receipts for cycle $359,178). I’ve included October receipts just because the Pre-Primaries left out a little time before the election.
- John Dyson outspent Mark Green in the Democratic Primary for U.S. Senate in NY about 10-1 in 1986 (so I’ve read).
And Then There’s This:
- Last year in Indianapolis, current Mayor Republican Greg Ballard, a political unknown, beat two-term Mayor Democrat Bart Peterson after being outspent 11-1. Wikipedia writes:
“Ballard was outspent in the campaign. As late as October 14, he had run no TV ads. An October 19 campaign finance report showed that Peterson had raised $1.5 million since April, and still had that much to spend. Comparatively, Ballard only had $51,000 left, meaning that Peterson had 30 times the funds Ballard had during the last three weeks of the campaign.
On November 6, 2007, Ballard won the race to become mayor of Indianapolis, despite having a meager $300,000 in campaign funds and low name recognition when he began the race. In comparison, Peterson already had $2.9 million in April (Ballard had $9,560 at the time). Unhappiness with rapidly increasing taxes and crime were seen as the biggest reasons for Peterson’s defeat. Republicans also recaptured control of the City-County Council for the first time in four years. In his acceptance speech, Ballard told the audience he considers this campaign ‘the classic, if not the ultimate, example of grassroots politics.’”
Posted 25 Jan 2008 at 10:51 pm ¶Trackbacks & Pingbacks 1
[…] Laesch 31,587) in unofficial Chicago Tribune results. I called the race as I understood it - and I was flat out wrong about John Laesch’s prospects which I considered quite slim. I suspect I over-emphasized what I thought I learned from John’s previous congressional […]
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