Last October, Representative Michele “Crazy as Steve King” Bachmann (MN-06) disgraced herself on “Hardball” and sparked a ridiculously successful fundraising drive for her Democratic opponent, El Tinklenberg. I was impressed by the enthusiasm and kicked in a few bucks for Tinklenberg myself, but I was dismayed to see bloggers continue to help him raise money even after he’d raised more than $750,000 and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee had promised to spend an additional $1 million in his district. Within a few days of Bachmann’s notorious comments, Tinklenberg had more money than he needed to run a solid media and GOTV campaign during the final two weeks before the election.
Since most Congressional races against incumbents are longshots, I wanted to see the netroots expand the field by raising $50,000 or more for a large number of unheralded challengers.
Instead, the fundraising frenzy for Tinklenberg continued.
Yesterday Markos linked to this piece from CQ Politics about how Tinklenberg’s campaign committee was the largest donor to the DCCC in March, giving a total of $250,000:
You may recall that his Republican opponent was Rep. Michele Bachmann, whose mid-October comment that Obama “may have anti-American views” angered Democrats nationwide and spawned an avalanche of contributions to Tinklenberg in the waning days of a campaign that Bachmann won by 46 percent to 43 percent, with a third-party candidate taking 10 percent.
Apparently the money was coming in too fast for Tinklenberg to spend completely: he raised $3 million for his campaign, of which $1.9 million came in after October 15, and had $453,000 in leftover campaign funds at the end of 2008 and $184,000 at the end of March.
I’m not saying it wasn’t worth getting behind Tinklenberg. Bachmann is among the worst Republicans in Congress, and this district rightly seemed winnable. However, the netroots clearly funneled way more money to Tinklenberg than he could spend effectively. We got carried away by emotions and were not thinking strategically.
What if a million of the dollars we sent to the MN-06 race had been spread around 10 or 20 other districts? A bunch of the candidates I wanted to support as part of an expanded field got blown out by large margins, but an extra $50,000 could have made the difference for Josh Segall in AL-03, or for several candidates who weren’t on my radar, such as Bill Hedrick in CA-44.
The netroots rally for Tinklenberg started out as a good cause but took on a momentum of its own. It didn’t help that Tinklenberg sent fundraising e-mails to his new donors every day or two during the home stretch, even after he had more than enough money to close out the campaign.
Maybe the majority of blog readers who gave $10 or $20 or $50 to Tinklenberg wouldn’t have given to some other longshot Congressional challenger. Maybe people need an emotional trigger before they are willing to open their wallets. But in future election cycles, we need to be smarter about how we focus our energy and our fundraising efforts during the final weeks of a campaign. There’s no shortage of wingnuts worth targeting. Also, a fair number of good incumbent Democrats will probably need our help in 2010, depending on how the economy looks 18 months from now.
Any ideas or suggestions on how to raise money effectively during the next cycle would be welcome in this thread.
…give all you can at least several weeks out.
What gets raised at the 11th hour is tough for a candidate to really use effectively. TV time is already bought up, and voters are saturated with too many commercials to notice late ad buys from unknowns.
I don’t have any problem with the netroots concentrating on a few targets at at time, as those targets do change over time so that the 5 who get the most play in early July get replaced in attention by 6 others later in the month, and so on through the cycle. Tinklenberg simply broke through when he broke through, and that was it…but it was too late, and there needed to be more focus there before Bachmann was on Hardball.
The real problem was that the blogging community needs to emphasize the importance of depleting our donations by mid-October and not wait any longer.
The only SoCal challengers who was on anyone’s radar last cycle was Debbie Cook in CA-46 and Francine Busby in CA-52. I don’t remember seeing anything about challengers in the other districts which Obama won.
Wouldn’t have changed that race, and it’s folly to assume otherwise. Late spending is not all that efficient, now if we would’ve invested earlier then maybe it would’ve been different, but on the other hand, early on there was no sign that this race was going to be competitive.
but what exactly is $50,000 going to do for anyone. that is little more than two pieces of mail and generally not enough for a week long tv buy in most districts in the country. Bottom line, without a minimum of $1 Million you are not a serious candidate.
made a very strong statement to all his supporters, inside and outside the district, that this isn’t the time to send money, it’s the time to send on-the-ground help.
At least seven former House members have over $1 million in their personal kitties according to the FEC and are running for nothing.
The worst, of course, is the sanctimonious Marty Meehan with over $4.9 million cash on hand. Also on the list: Bud Cramer($1.3), Joseph P. Kennedy($1.6), Rahm Emanuel($1.1), Jim Turner ($1.0) (TX) and the late Tom Lantos ($1.2) plus Republican Mark Foley ($1.2).
Is there a way of recycling the balances of these individuals?