So following up on the cash-on-hand rankings for House races, I’ve culled just the California ones from that list, and then used the massive fundraising round-up to add in some other California challengers, and then plowed through the FEC database to find the rest. (I’ve put McClintock as the incumbent because he belongs to the same party as Doolittle. Same for Duncan Hunter’s son.)
Cash figures are in the thousands of dollars. Fundraising table after the fold.
| District | Challenger | Party | Q2 | CoH | Incumbent | Party | Q2 | CoH | Cash Power Index |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CA-04 | Brown | D | $355 | $675 | McClintock | R | $1,269 | $117 | 577% |
| CA-50 | Leibham | D | $246 | $267 | Bilbray | R | $210 | $528 | 51% |
| CA-11 | Andal | R | $174 | $663 | McNerney | D | $416 | $1,376 | 48% |
| CA-03 | Durston | D | $125 | $189 | Lungren | R | $173 | $615 | 31% |
| CA-45 | Bornstein | D | $96 | $122 | Bono Mack | R | $336 | $421 | 29% |
| CA-52 | Lumpkin | D | $129 | $54 | Hunter, Jr. | R | $338 | $198 | 27% |
| CA-46 | Cook | D | $110 | $97 | Rohrabacher | R | $86 | $388 | 25% |
| CA-49 | Hamilton | D | $18 | $27 | Issa | R | $158 | $120 | 23% |
| CA-44 | Hedrick | D | $49 | $36 | Calvert | R | $174 | $319 | 11% |
| CA-41 | Prince | D | $3.6 | $91 | Lewis | R | $161 | $952 | 9.6% |
| CA-26 | Warner | D | $161 | $125 | Dreier | R | $247 | $1,904 | 7% |
| CA-48 | Young | D | $68 | $9.7 | Campbell | R | $252 | $408 | 2.4% |
| CA-02 | Morris | D | $8.5 | $8.6 | Herger | R | $204 | $474 | 1.8% |
| CA-42 | Chau | D | $34 | $12 | Miller | R | $130 | $950 | 1.3% |
| CA-25 | Conaway | D | $1.26 | $0.3 | McKeon | R | $127 | $300 | 0.1% |
| CA-21 | Johnson | D | $3.0 | $0.9 | Nunes | R | $206 | $972 | 0.09% |
| CA-24 | Jorgensen | D | $0.54 | $0.075 | Gallegly | R | $141 | $841 | 0.009% |
| CA-40 | Avalos | D | ??? | ??? | Royce | R | $151 | $2,431 | ??? |
Then I decided to look at some of our own incumbents that are deemed “safe”, just for comparison’s sake. There are some incumbents missing from this list because their Republican challengers have raised so little, they haven’t even filed FEC fundraising reports. I believe I’ve gotten every single race where the challenger has an actual FEC report for Q2. Unlike above, which is ranked by the Cash Power Index, these are arranged by congressional district.
| District | Challenger | Party | Q2 | CoH | Incumbent | Party | Q2 | CoH | Cash Power Index |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CA-05 | Smith | R | $0 | $0.5 | Matsui | D | $157 | $270 | 0.17% |
| CA-06 | Halliwell | R | $7.4 | $0.02 | Woolsey | D | $106 | $102 | 0.02% |
| CA-08 | Walsh | R | $129 | $45 | Pelosi | D | $581 | $455 | 10% |
| CA-08 | Sheehan | I | ??? | $3.7 | Pelosi | D | $581 | $455 | 0.8% |
| CA-10 | Gerber | R | $6 | $27 | Tauscher | D | $157 | $453 | 6% |
| CA-12 | Conlon | R | $30 | $4.5 | McNerney | D | $336 | $570 | 0.8% |
| CA-23 | Kokkonen | R | $1 | $26 | Capps | D | $158 | $423 | 6% |
| CA-27 | Singh | R | $6 | $7.4 | Sherman | D | $183 | $1,835 | 0.4% |
| CA-29 | Hahn | R | $5 | $5 | Schiff | D | $154 | $1,583 | 0.3% |
| CA-34 | Balding | R | $3 | $3 | Roybal-Allard | D | $78 | $62 | 4.9% |
| CA-35 | Hayes | R | $5.9 | $1.8 | Waters | D | $110 | $90 | 2% |
| CA-36 | Gibson | R | $1.8 | $0.6 | Harman | D | $217 | $429 | 0.15% |
| CA-39 | Lenning | R | $0.5 | $2 | Sanchez | D | $74 | $200 | 0.99% |
| CA-43 | Roberts | R | $14 | $24 | Baca | D | $203 | $101 | 24% |
| CA-47 | Avila | R | $13 | $12 | Sanchez | D | $161 | $558 | 2.1% |
| CA-53 | Crimmins | R | $7.1 | $3.2 | Davis | D | $96 | $507 | 0.6% |
* Hayes’ Q2 number is actually Q1 and Q2 combined.
Notes: That’s not a misprint, Marta Jorgensen (D) has a total of $75 cash on hand. And that’s not a misprint either, in CA-05, Paul Smith (R) officially raised a total of $0 in his challenge to Doris Matsui (D).
Christina Avalos (D) is a tricky matter. I finally found her in the FEC database after quite a bit of searching. But it doesn’t help that the last listed contribution to her is from the year 2002, and that her page doesn’t list anything after her statement of candidacy… in 2001. Trying to search by her candidate ID to get fundraising numbers yields an SQL error 100 for some reason.
I almost feel a little embarrassed by listing some of those races in the first list on there. It may be one of those cases where we’re almost better off not knowing just how bad the disparity is.
I was a bit surprised at how little money McClintock has left after the primary. But beware, he was a fundraising monster in Q2, bringing in over $1.26 million. What happened with the spending limits here? There’s people like the Bloom family that gave McClintock $6,900 each. Looks like Doug Ose triggered the Millionaire’s Amendment when he gave himself a whopping $2.8 million loan for his failed campaign. But that was for the primary. Now that we’re in the general, is McClintock only allowed to get a maximum of $2,300 from those people? If so, hopefully we’ll see those Q3 numbers for McClintock drop significantly. Because raising $1.2 million in one quarter for a House race is sick.
For those wondering about Cindy Sheehan’s independent bid against Pelosi, she never filed a final Q2 report, and whoever filled out that last report wrote that it goes through December 31, 2008. It looks like they meant 2007, but their filings seem pretty disorganized. They also got a stern letter from the FEC for not filing their Q1 report properly, and then another one for having several discrepancies in their filing.
As for Diane Watson, what’s going on with her fundraising? Her Q2 report says that while she has a little under $18,000 in cash on hand, her campaign committee owes over $25,000 in debts and obligations. WTF?
If you want to go by just the fundraising numbers, John Roberts (no, not the CNN anchor) would seem about as competitive against Joe Baca as Debbie Cook is against Dana Rohrabacher. Of course, we’ve got the big advantage with the DCCC being able to spend much more than the NRCC.