Since the second quarter of 2007 ended tonight, and since I'm a total geekazoid when it comes to looking at fundraising numbers, I decided to follow-up on Thursday night's post tallying the 20 hottest House candidates as ranked by their total 2007 fundraising on Actblue.com. To deepen the picture, I’ve also added the total number of contributors this time. Here is the new ranking:
| State | CD | Candidate | Raised on Actblue | Contributors |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| CO | 2 | Jared Polis | $128,216 | 266 |
| MA | 5 | Niki Tsongas | $118,887 | 341 |
| MA | 5 | Jamie Eldridge | $102,420 | 570 |
| ME | 1 | Chellie Pingree | $97,000 | 210 |
| IL | 10 | Dan Seals | $68,073 | 218 |
| CA | 26 | Russ Warner | $66,946 | 199 |
| MO | 6 | Kay Barnes | $58,859 | 82 |
| AZ | 3 | Bob Lord | $55,705 | 145 |
| TX | 10 | Dan Grant | $54,150 | 132 |
| NY | 26 | Jon Powers | $48,375 | 217 |
| NY | 29 | Eric Massa | $48,255 | 423 |
| CA | 4 | Charlie Brown | $45,738 | 943 |
| FL | 8 | Mike Smith | $42,820 | 62 |
| NM | 1 | Martin Heinrich | $35,149 | 172 |
| MD | 4 | Donna Edwards | $34,260 | 522 |
| NC | 8 | Larry Kissell | $30,687 | 265 |
| CT | 4 | Jim Himes | $25,813 | 48 |
| MT | AL | Bill Kennedy | $17,366 | 67 |
| MA | 5 | Barry Finegold | $16,250 | 16 |
| NM | 2 | Bill McCamley | $13,930 | 47 |
An exciting crop of challengers, to be sure. But this list also shows the role for both small and large dollar fundraising with Actblue. And by looking at both the depth and breadth of these funds, Blue Majority candidates Charlie Brown and Donna Edwards are in good shape with a large small donor base. I’m looking forward to those 2Q reports!
Hopefully he can get past the primary in 2008. It was pretty discouraging when he lost last time.
The highest averages per contributor: Finegold ($1015.63 per contributor) and Barnes ($717.79 per contributor)
Jon Powers has been really impressive. He only started fundraising in June, I think, and he’s already at number 10 on this list.
Powers is getting a lot of support on the ground in New York, and he’s running against Tom Reynolds, who you may remember from such previous episodes as Mark Foley Coverup and Honey, I Sold Out Our Economy.
As someone who’s been very active in Massachusetts in the past several years, I get bitter & frustrated at the way so much of the netroots concentrates only on red vs. blue and discounts “safe democratic” as “not worth of our attention” … and then gets upset when Democratic majorities don’t do what we wish they would. Wake up: It matters *which* Democrats we elect.
This battle for the soul of the party is best waged in primaries, and the best place to do that is in those “safe” seats: those are the ones where we don’t have to worry about losing to a Republican. In the kinds of districts the netroots enjoys talking about, we’ll take any Dem because it’s almost always better than the Republican incumbent.
MA-05 is an open seat in Massachusetts, which doesn’t happen very often. There’s a wide-open primary with 5 Democrats running, and whichever of them wins the primary will get the seat. Will we get a relatively quiet good vote? A recalcitrant semiconservative we have to keep cajoling? A real progressive leader? All of these are possible. And it matters!
Pay attention, netroots. Ignoring this kind of race is exactly why we don’t get what we want from Democratic majorities. We need to elect some real leaders and this is the best kind of race to do it in.
(FYI, I was one of those 570 ActBlue contributors to Jamie Eldridge)