To make it easier to see how the fundraising race has progressed, I made a chart tracking donations to Ted Cruz, David Dewhurst and Tom Leppert:
Since this just tracks campaign donations, it doesn’t include self-funding, which both Dewhurst and Leppert have made extensive use of. After Dewhurst’s full Q4 FEC report is up, I’ll do another chart on those numbers.
Tom Leppert only raised $387,000 from donors in Q4 plus threw in another half million of his own money. That’s down significantly from the $640,000 he raised from donors in Q3, which was down from the $750,000 he raised from donors in Q2, which, in turn, was down from the $1 million from donors he raised in Q1 of 2011, when he first jumped into the race. That can’t be an encouraging trend-line for Team Leppert, since he can’t self-fund at the same clip David Dewhurst can.
Leppert also released his taxes for the last three years, which is better than David Dewhurst’s two, but worse than Craig James and Ted Cruz’s five. The Statesman summary: Leppert’s “returns showed adjusted gross income of $1.5 million in 2008, $1.28 million in 2009 and $443, 194 in 2010. In all three years, he paid effective tax rates of more than 21 percent.”
I couldn’t find where Leppert’s returns were online, so I just sent off a query to them.
The Cruz campaign announced that it raised $1.1 million in Q4. That’s slightly up from the $1.05 million he raised in Q3, but honestly, I find it a bit disappointing; I would expect him to have a bigger Q4 fundraising bump from his National Review cover than that. They go on to note that the Cruz campaign ended the quarter having raised nearly $4 million for the race overall, and have $2.8 million cash on hand.
David Dewhurst, as previously reported, raised $1.54 million from donors in Q4, which was down from his Q3 totals, but we don’t know yet if he kicked any more of his own money into his campaign.
Dewhurst was always going to be the leading fundraiser in this race. The good news for the Cruz campaign is that, given the later primary date from the redistricting court fight, he has more time to close the fundraising gap. And Cruz is still winning the passion and momentum battles. But his campaign still needs to do more to leverage those advantages into contributions.
David Dewhurst only raised $1.54 Million from donors in Q4.
While far from chicken-feed, those numbers seem really disappointing to me, especially given that he pulled in $2.64 million in donor contributions in Q3. Those are just donor numbers, and we don’t know much of Dewhurst’s own considerable wealth he tossed in until he tells us, or his official FEC numbers go up (there’s usually a significant lag between the campaign announcement and the FEC putting the numbers up).
As the establishment candidate and presumptive favorite, Dewhurst should be running away in the fundraising race. He’s not.
Tom Leppert’s campaign announced that it raised $640,000 in donations in Q3. In addition, it announced that Leppert, as he did in Q2, threw in another half million of his own money.
Those are significant sums, and by no means disasterous, but it’s slightly less than the $750,000 in contributions he raised in Q2, which was, in turn, less than the $1 million in contributions and $1.6 million in self-funding he raised in Q1.
So far Leppert has run a relatively smart and disciplined campaign, and currently has more cash on hand than Cruz, but he’s still in third place. He hasn’t generated the grassroots enthusiasm and buzz that Cruz has, and I’m reasonably sure he can’t self-fund at nearly the level David Dewhurst can. Though Leppert has positioned himself as a conservative (and issued many conservative position papers on a range of issues), he seems to draw more from Dewhurst’s establishment base in the business community, and the slight decrease in Q3 numbers may indicate that Dewhurst is already eating into those funding sources. Further, I see no signs that Leppert has successfully moved beyond his geographical base of support in the greater Dallas Metroplex.
On the plus side, Leppert hasn’t seen quite the falloff in donations predicted by Cruz consultant Jason Johnson and he’s continued to attend the candidate forums (though he does not seem to be generating a lot of enthusiasm at them), which is more than you can say for Dewhurst. Also, no more skeletons have fallen out of his closet since the SEIU and ACORN revelations. That might change. (I might even shake a bone or two myself in coming weeks…)
Obviously the Cruz campaign would like to see Leppert drop out to make it a clear one-on-one campaign against Dewhurst. However, while Leppert has not set the grass roots on fire, he has run a solid race, which is more than you can say for Elizabeth Ames Jones. If things continue on in the same vein, Leppert is well-positioned if one of the frontrunners stumbles or withdraws. After all, it’s politics, and stranger things have happened.
However, right now Leppert is clearly in third place, and I expect Cruz’s new, National Review-boosted profile to result in a Q4 contribution increase sufficient to erase Leppert’s current self-funded edge in cash-on-hand.
Leppert is hanging tough and running a competitive campaign, but in the end I don’t think that will be enough to get him into the runoff.
(Edited to add: After I published, this I noticed that the Dallas Morning News link at the top had been updated to say that Elizabeth Ames Jones pulled in $235,000 for Q3. He doesn’t provide a link for this, and I can’t yet find confirmation on her website, Facebook page or Twitter feed. If true, I don’t see how Jones thinks she can compete with three candidates who all have ten times as much cash on hand as she does.)
Here are are some impressive fundraising numbers: Through the end of Q3 on September 30, the odds-on senate favorite has raised $6,444,926.
The challenger? A comparatively paltry $1,615,165.
Given those numbers, it should be pretty easy to figure out who the eventual winner is going to be, right?
Wrong.
Those numbers are from 2009, the odds-on favorite was sitting Florida Governor Charlie Crist, and the underfunded challenger was then-Speaker of the state House of Representatives Marco Rubio. Of course, that’s Senator Marco Rubio now, since he ended up pantsing Crist so badly the latter dropped out of the Republican primary and ran as an independent …whereupon Rubio kicked his ass.
What happened? The Tea Party happened and Rubio caught fire as a better (and more conservative) candidate. Also, this happened:
After that, Rubio’s fortunes (and fundraising) climbed while Crist’s fell. That’s why this:
Should throw a sense of deep unease into David Dewhurst’s campaign team.
Of course, that’s not the only similarity between Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio:
I’m hardly the first one to make comparisons between Cruz and Rubio. (The Cruz campaign has not been shy about it either.)
However, there are some differences that will make Cruz’s campaign against Dewhurst more difficult than Rubio’s was against Crist:
Still, at this point Dewhurst is running behind where Crist was during the same period, and Cruz is likewise running ahead of where Rubio was. Also, Texas is considerably more conservative than Florida.
All this is a prelude to saying that Dewhurst’s and Cruz’s Q3 fundraising numbers are interesting, but hardly dispositive. There’s still a lot of race to be run.
Hot on the heels of Ted Cruz’s $1 million+ Q3 comes news that David Dewhurst raised $2.64 million in contributions. He also threw in $2 million of his own money, and has $4 million in cash on hand.
That’s serious money, and having raised that much in essentially a month is impressive, no matter how you slice it. Still, Dewhurst was always seen as the “bank” in the race, and as someone who’s run successful, high profile statewide races before, it’s no surprise that his fundraising operation hit the ground running. A good portion of that $2.64 million is no doubt coming from Dewhurst supporters who were sitting on the sidelines waiting for him to get into the race, or business interests hoping to “back the winning horse.” It will be interesting to see if he can maintain that torrid pace in Q4.
If there’s any cause for optimism among the Cruz campaign is that Dewhurst only put in $2 million of his own money in Q3, which means he still may be underestimating Cruz, as Dewhurst is purported to be so rich that he could easily give 10 times that much.
I hope to provide some additional context to those fundraising totals in the next day or so…
(Note: Totals corrected. When I first put this up, I said he raised $2.4 million, but that’s actually how much he raised over the last 31 days in the period.)
It’s time for candidate’s Q3 fundraising totals to start trickling out, and the Ted Cruz campaign is first out of the gate with the news that he raised $1,057,953 in Q3 and has $2.4 million cash on-hand. This is in line with his Q1 and Q2 fundraising totals, and I would expect a huge bump in Q4 thanks to his cover appearance in National Review.
Now we wait for the Q3 fundraising numbers for the other candidates. How much personal money will David Dewhurst sink into his own campaign? Will Tom Leppert continue to self-fund at his $1 million a quarter clip? Has Ricardo Sanchez been fundraising in Q3? Or doing anything at all?
Stay tuned…
FEC Reports for the Texas Senate Race continue to be posted for the fundraising period of January 1—March 31. (Indeed, they’re being posted so slowly that I wonder if a single arthritic temp is doing all the data entry.) The reports of Ted Cruz (over $1 million announced) and Michael Williams (over half a million announced) are not up yet, Tom Leppert’s $2,690,081 ($1.6 million of which was Leppert’s personal loan to his own campaign) was already announced, and Roger Williams raised $598,470.
But Elizabeth Ames Jones’ report is finally up, and it’s disastrous: $122,185. Raising less than one-quarter what the other major declared candidates have in the same period of time isn’t going to get the job done. Moreover, it’s a major step back from her previous 2010 fundraising total of $989,765.
Jones already had the most difficult path to victory of the major declared candidates, a path some were already saying was non-existent. Ted Cruz and Michael Williams were battling in the Tea Party Primary for the movement conservative vote, while Tom Leppert and Roger Williams are competing for the “who gets the establishment nod if David Dewhurst skips the race” slot. Jones, on the other hand, has, what? Unless she can magically pick up a disproportionate share of the woman’s vote (which seems doubtful), it’s impossible to see how she remains competitive when she’s been so heavily outgunned in the fundraising arms race. I’m far from an insider, but as far as I can tell, the groundswell for a Jones candidacy has been all but non-existent.
There’s a long way yet to go before the primary, but unless Jones can, at a minimum, quadruple her fundraising totals in the second quarter, she’s toast. She made be toast already.
Patty Murray’s explanation for why she thinks Texas might be in play is “demographic change.” We have been hearing that line for many years now, and there is no evidence that demographic change has changed voting patterns. Democrats make the mistake of looking at Hispanic participation in California, in Colorado, in Arizona, in New Mexico, and thinking that Texas could be just like those states. I disagree. Hispanics in those states are alienated. Angry people vote. Hispanics in Texas are not alienated. Unless the Democrats have some pretty good polling that shows the Republicans are overreaching with their budget cuts–and I doubt that they do–they should continue to regard Texas as a lost cause.
If Sanchez runs as a Democrat, the groups that would have been most likely to push for further investigation at this late date–the antiwar Left–will not be interested in pursuing the issue. The antiwar Left will, in fact, enthusiastically support the man who was their head devil in their designated Hell on Earth…because to do otherwise would be to show some elementary sense of self-worth and dignity, and the antiwar Left has neither. So–when your Democratic masters get around to picking your candidate for you–go ahead and endorse Sanchez, ye progressives. Get on the floor and lick those boots. Not that Sanchez will win, anyway; 2012 will be a bad year for a Democrat in Texas. But it’s always fun to watch the antiwar movement futilely beat its own ‘principles’ to death on command for the benefit of their masters. You’d think that it’d get old eventually, but no.