Tag: BMW Direct

Our twice-daily digests are also open threads for any campaign-related news you might have. Interesting/helpful links always appreciated!

AR-Sen: State Sen. Gilbert Baker is jumping all over GOP primary opponent Rep. John Boozman for his extensive travels abroad on the taxpayer dime. In a statement, Baker promised that, as senator, he will be sure to visit Paris, London, and England – all towns in Arkansas.

CA-Sen: NOM, NOM, NOM. The haters at the National Organization for (Heterosexual-Only) Marriage have launched an ad campaign attacking Republican ex-Rep. Tom Campbell for supporting gay marriage. CQ describes it as a statewide ad buy, but at only $275,000, that doesn’t get you very much in California. Meanwhile, Carlyfornia has drunk the winger kool-aid – while she supported cap-and-trade when stumping for John McCain two years ago, now she’s against it. Of course.

FL-Sen: Heh – PPP asked Floridians who their favorite governors are out of the last five to hold office. Only 4% of Republicans answered Charlie Crist – fewer than the number who named either Dem Bob Graham or Dem Lawton Chiles.

PA-Sen: Republican pollster Susquehanna has GOPer Pat Toomey up over Arlen Specter by 42-36, in contrast to recent polls by Quinnipiac and Research 2000 showing Specter leading by that margin. Susquehanna didn’t poll the Dem primary, though, and more weirdly, they didn’t even test Joe Sestak against Toomey. Huh?

FL-22: Toward the bottom of an interesting, in-depth look at Base Connect (the sketchy GOP consultants formerly known as BMW Direct), Dave Weigel has a good catch. It turns out that the much-hyped vet Allen West is also a BMW client. He’s raised $1.2 million this cycle, an extraordinary sum for a challenger, but check out that burn rate – he’s spent over $500,000 so far. His opponent, Rep. Ron Klein, has only spent $95K. West still has a lot of cash on hand, but this revelation changes the picture somewhat.

NY-13: SEIU chief Andy Stern says that his organization will back independent candidacies against House Dems who vote against healthcare. It seems that Stern would prefer to challenge wayward Dems in primaries, but many filing deadlines have already passed. However, the one actual “nay” vote Stern cites, Rep. Mike McMahon, serves in New York, where the filing deadline does not close for quite some time. (And as per yesterday’s bullet, the Working Families Party said they won’t give their line to McMahon either.)

PA-06: The Pennsylvania SEIU, which just endorsed Arlen Specter, also gave their backing to Dem Doug Pike in his primary against Manan Trivedi.

Census: I received my 2010 Census form last night. Have you gotten yours yet?

Congress: Congress.org takes a look at former staffers who now occupy seats of their own on the Hill and notes that their ranks have been increasing since World War II. At least six staffers are running for office this year.

Lulz: Hard to believe, but disgraced and discredited “pollster” Strategic Vision claims to have undertaken a survey of the Georgia governor’s race. Even sadder, a flack for outgoing Gov. Sonny Perdue actually emailed around the “results” to reporters. Still waiting for that lawsuit against Nate Silver.

Teabagging: Virginia Thomas, the wife of none other than Sup. Ct. Justice Clarence Thomas, has formed a new lobbying company to exploit capitalize on teabagger sentiment. The LAT notes:

As a 501(c)(4) nonprofit, Liberty Central can raise unlimited amounts of corporate money and largely avoid disclosing its donors.

Because of a recent Supreme Court decision, Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission, the group may also spend corporate money freely to advocate for or against candidates for office.

Justice Thomas was part of the 5-4 majority in that case.

SSP: We have 287 fans on le Facebook so far. Pretty please take us to 300? I ain’t too proud to beg.

Some of you may have had the same “wtf?” moment that I did upon seeing James’s Q1 Cash-on-Hand Competitiveness from a few months ago: the Democratic representative who was in the deepest fundraising hole vis-à-vis his or her opponent wasn’t Carol Shea-Porter or Nancy Boyda or Tim Mahoney… it was David Scott, sitting in GA-13, a safe black-majority district in Atlanta’s suburbs. He was being outraised by Deborah Honeycutt, who had actually raised 105% of CoH that Scott had.

There’s a not-so-simple explanation at work here: GA-13 is ground zero for the efforts of a shadowy Republican direct-mail group called BMW Direct that specializes in using national fundraising appeals on behalf of conservative candidates at the local level. Josh Marshall summed up BMW’s agenda succinctly:

finding nonsense Republican candidates in hopeless races, raising tons of money for their hopeless campaigns and then funneling all the money back to themselves and sundry contractors and cronies.

Honeycutt has posted some remarkable fundraising numbers, raising $1.7 million this cycle ($500,000 of that in Q1 alone), and burned through $1.5 million of it. (This despite being the 2006 candidate, and losing to Scott by a 69-31 margin as a result of having “no presence” locally.) The odd thing is: only $16,695 of that money got spent on the ground in Georgia. The rest simply disappeared into BMW’s internal operations, or got farmed out to BMW contractors for activities like data processing and list rentals.

The Boston Globe broke the story, focusing on Charles Morse’s 2006 race against Barney Frank. Morse raised $700,000 for the race in MA-04 via BMW’s direct-mailing efforts, but 96% of that money, rather than being spent in the district, was paid to BMW. The net result of Morse’s amazing fundraising? He won a total of 145 votes in the primary, failing to qualify for the general election.

BMW does apparently help a few legitimate officeholders (including Robin Hayes and Jim Ryun), but their efforts mostly seem to center on fleecing low-information right-wing grannies to give money to invest in candidates on the basis of flimsy appeals, all the while knowing that the candidates are going nowhere and running bare-bones campaigns, allowing them to keep almost all the money for themselves. (As several TPM commenters pointed out, this is almost exactly the plot line from The Producers.) Rarely has there ever been such a clear illustration of the giant pyramid scheme that is the Republican Party.