It is becoming more and more clear with each passing day that our competitive Democratic challenges to the 32 Republican held state senate seats has grown to the 12 to 14 seat range. A great deal of money will be needed to materialize many of these dozen or so challenges into Democratic pickups in November. Early in the cycle it seemed as though we would enjoy the advantage of former Governor Spitzer’s fundraising prowess to foot the bill needed to do the job. Of late, it has become apparent that Governor David Paterson will not be bringing anything close to those resources to the table.
more after the flip
Our 30 incumbents as a group have raised well as have many of our challengers. But to expand the playing field in the spirit of our NDC Chair Howard Dean’s fifty state project we will need our incumbents who will greatly benefit from gaining the majority to play a key role as well. The fact that we have so many safe seats that will be effectively unchallenged in November reminded me of the 2006 successful campaign to get safe Democratic US House and Senate candidates to kick in from their resources to help fund what became a 30 seat house and 6 seat senate pickup.
While visiting MYDD today, I read desmoinesdem front page post calling for a 2008 version of the “Use it or Lose it” campaign. Here is desmoinesdem brief description of the effort:
In 2006, MyDD and MoveOn.org launched a “Use It Or Lose It” campaign to contact “ultra-safe Democratic House Representatives and ask them to help fully fund all of our competitive challengers this cycle.” The project spurred at least $2.3 million in additional major donations from House incumbents (click the link to read details).
So, why not a similar effort lead by our TAP Community to get the DSCC to bring the pressure to bear on our unchallenged or under-challenged state senate incumbents that can raise significant funds to be distributed among our growing list of competitive challengers. Lets take a look at some of the Cash on Hand in the July BOE reports for these Democratic State Senators:
SD 07 – Craig Johnson 453.9 K (Contested Gen.)
SD 10 – Shirley Huntley 6.9 K (Light Primary)
SD 12 – George Onorato 278.0 K
SD 13 – John Sabini 52.0 K (Not Running)
SD 14 – Malcolm Smith 782.0 K
SD 16 – Toby Staviskey 215.0 k (Light Primary)
SD 17 – Martin Dilon 28.1 K
SD 18 – Velm.Montgomery 52.0 K
SD 19 – John Sampson 33.6 K
SD 20 – Eric Adams 35.0 K
SD 21 – Kevin Parker 45.5 K (heavy Primary)
SD 23 – Diane Savino 67.5 K
SD 25 – Martin Connor 83.0 K (HEAVY PRIMARY)
SD 26 – Liz Krueger 324.5 K
SD 27 – Carl Kruger 1814.6 K
SD 28 – Jose Serrano 30.3 K
SD 29 – Tom Duanne 114.7 K
SD 30 – Bill Perkins 38.7 K
SD 31 – EricSchneiderman 47.8 K
SD 32 – Ruben Diaz 30.3 K
SD 33 – Efrain Gonzalez(10.8 K) (Light Primary)
SD 34 – Jeffrey Klein NA
SD 35 – Andrea Stew-Cous, 180.5 K(Contested Gen.)
SD 36 – Ruth Thompson 0.0 K (Light Primary)
SD 37 – Suzi Oppenheimer 68.8 K (Contested Gen.)
SD 46 – Neil Breslin 148.5 K (Primary???)
SD 48 – Darrel Aubertine 45.3 K (Contested Gen.)
SD 49 – David Valesky 191.6 K(Gen.Opp only 31k)
SD 58 – William Stachowski 47.3 K
SD 60 – Antoine Thompson 50.5 K
While most of our incumbents have some level of sacrificial lamb challengers, I only listed contested General for our targeted incumbents or where some quasi reasonable funds were raised by their opponent.
If we exempt all our incumbents with contested Generals and Heavy contested primary challenges we have 21 incumbents in no genuine threat sitting on 4.2 million dollars. That is 4.4 M with no need to spend it in 2008 and an ongoing ability to raise it. If each of these incumbents were assessed to donate back to our serious challengers just 25% of their COH we would have over $1M more to invest in our challengers. That is one million dollars more to enable the challengers to make strong stretch drive runs at their GOP incumbents or open GOP seats! Even if Carl Kruger has other electoral ambitions with that 1.8 M he has a proven ability to easily raise back his 450 K boosty! A powerful majority chairmanship has got to be worth the price of 25% of an unneeded campaign stash. If it can be done with our congressional incumbents who thirsted for a return to the majority why not our incumbent state senators who are four times as parched!
The question is, How do we go about bringing the kind of pressure on these state senate incumbents as MYDD and Moveon.org did in 2006 and plan to do again this cycle?