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Laura and I put up fundraising numbers as they were happening here, here and here, but it's a good idea to step back for a minute and take a look at the big picture, which was actually really surprising for me in a number of ways.
By far the biggest fundraising story of the quarter: Carol Shea-Porter brought in over $260,000. That's more than Jeb Bradley and John Stephen, than Bob Clegg and Jennifer Horn. That's more than Paul Hodes (!), who, for his own part, demolished his competition at $254.9K and with nearly a million CoH.
In today's Granite Status (which I'm not linking to), DiStaso does his level best to put the worst possible spin on this amazing achievement, citing up front the advantages of incumbency and then moving quickly into PAC money, and finally bringing out the old "MoveOn" saw to stir up the wingers in the comment section of NH's premiere RW blog. Only at the end of the section does he admit that almost half of her contris from individuals were from amounts smaller than $250. That's a stunning display of Carol's grassroots support in this state.
And I'll include what DiStaso fails to mention, from Shea-Porter's own thank you letter for my teeny tiny contribution: "I do not accept any Business PAC or federal lobbyist money."
One more thing. Though I'm sure the last thing she wants is the attention, I'm going to give it to her anyway. There's no doubt in my mind that some of this outstanding success in money raising has to do in part with Carol's campaign manager, Pia Carusone. When it was first reported that she was going from the NHDP to Shea-Porter, I was overjoyed. Turns out I had reason to be.
On to another huge story out of this quarter's take: the two likely Republican nominees, Jeb Bradley and Bob Clegg, have no idea how to manage money responsibly. The George Bush party of fiscal responsibility has brought forth two frontrunners who are deeply in debt to keep their campaigns going.
Not only did Jeb spend more than he earned this quarter, he also loaned his campaign another 50K on top of an already ridiculous amount of overall debt from back when he was a Congresscritter. And friend of lobbyists Bob Clegg has loaned his campaign a quarter of a million dollars ot ensure that he can drown out Jennifer Horn with money that didn't come from actual supporters. And on the CD1 side, Stephen stayed competitive with Jeb without going into debt. I starting to think he might just pull this out, which would be most unfortunate. I'm looking forward to seeing Bush League Bradley lose a second time in the general election.
One more, very reported, but very important, piece of news: for the second quarter in a row, Shaheen significantly outraised John E. Sununu, by well over a half a million dollars. So much for the advantages of incumbency. Meanwhile, the Sprinter is covering up for his lackluster quarter by boasting that he's sitting on 5 million CoH. To repeat this point once again, it's fun to talk money in the bank when you have no real intention of campaigning until after Labor Day, so we'll see how this starts to play out in September when he starts bleeding Benjamins and carpet bombing our state with ads.
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