I enjoyed compiling the figures for this diary so much last month, that I’ve decided to turn our tracking of the twenty hottest House challengers on ActBlue.com into a monthly series.
Here’s the August installment:
| State | CD | Candidate | Actblue Total | Contributions |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| CO | 2 | Jared Polis | $137,304 | 321 |
| MA | 5 | Niki Tsongas | $136,852 | 406 |
| MA | 5 | Jamie Eldridge | $113,154 | 694 |
| ME | 1 | Chellie Pingree | $103,785 | 247 |
| CA | 26 | Russ Warner | $74,840 | 232 |
| IL | 10 | Dan Seals | $71,073 | 234 |
| MO | 6 | Kay Barnes | $69,949 | 102 |
| NY | 29 | Eric Massa | $64,507 | 755 |
| AZ | 3 | Bob Lord | $59,440 | 163 |
| TX | 10 | Dan Grant | $58,220 | 145 |
| NY | 26 | Jon Powers | $54,117 | 288 |
| FL | 8 | Mike Smith | $49,825 | 73 |
| CA | 4 | Charlie Brown | $46,485 | 990 |
| NM | 1 | Martin Heinrich | $42,744 | 205 |
| MD | 4 | Donna Edwards | $36,828 | 612 |
| NC | 8 | Larry Kissell | $32,282 | 308 |
| CT | 4 | Jim Himes | $27,759 | 76 |
| IL | 4 | Ricardo Muñoz | $25,590 | 67 |
| IA | 4 | Selden Spencer | $18,855 | 123 |
| MT | AL | Bill Kennedy | $17,866 | 71 |
Certainly an exciting group of challengers. One guy I’ll be keeping my eye on his rematch candidate Selden Spencer, who raised under $500K in is 2006 challenge to Republican Rep. Tom Latham, which he lost by a 57-43 margin. Let’s see what he can do with an earlier start. (In the second quarter, he raised $88K.)
PS: Anyone wanna help put Charlie Brown over the top to 1000 contributions?
It would be nice to know about the Senate candidates, too. I would love to pick up enough seats to tell Joementum to go fuck himself.
For reasons I can’t define, Charlie Brown doesn’t fire my imagination like some other good candidates, but I put him on my ActBlue roster, mostly to honor his early start on this cycle:
http://www.actblue.c…
I made a small contribution myself, and his campaign hasn’t deluged me with requests for more. Some candidates, you’re right, are ceaselessly importunate. Paccione got on my nerves, last cycle. But the grand gurus of gimme all the time have to be Ted Kennedy and Hillary Clinton, if my mailboxes are the metric.
mean really, what’s so great about him, I mean Fitz-Gerald is about as good a candidate as we could hope for. Liberal, experienced. I’ve always really like her, she’s been a big leader and part of the Democratic gains to the state legislature.
Yeah, I’d pitch in $20 or so to add to the number of donors to Charlie Brown’s worthy campaign — IF, and only IF, someone could guarantee that I would not receive, over the next year and a half, an unending series of mailings (costing about $30 at least) urging me to contribute still more.
I’d like to give a little boost to a candidate, let him/her have bragging rights about a challenger “who received over 1,000 contribution via the online site ActBlue.”
But I’m not gonna give more and more, over and over, no matter how many urgent mail appeals I receive, again and again. I am NOT. And I don’t want my money wasted on the ceaseless mailings urging me to do what I already know that I will NOT do.
When ActBlue adds a useful variation of the “do not call” feature, please let us all know.