Second Quarter Fundraising Report in Congressional Races is OUT — and There’s a Surprise or Two

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Liza Minnelli and Joel Grey, seeking Weimar donations.

The 2nd quarter donations for our Congressional races were due last Friday.  Scott Lay did the hard work (possibly not very hard) of posting them on his Around the Capital site, from which I snarfed them for your reading pleasure.  I’m throwing in CA-44, too, because it’s an interesting and competitive race — and because Long Beach really is sort of part of Orange County.   In its way.  So I maintain.

CD 38

La Palma (and LA County) Rep. Linda Sanchez does have an opponent in this race — Republican Ryan Downing — but his fundraising lags.

CD 39

Yes, a 1000-to-1 deficit in cash-on-hand is sort of on the bleak side — although only a 30,000 vote deficit in the primary is pretty good — but funding Brett Murdock better could have the effect of reducing Ed Royce’s expenditures.  On what did Royce expend his money in his 85K to 55K primary victory?  Other people’s campaigns.  It sure wasn’t evidence here in his district.  Murdock has already had at least one national-headliner fundraiser here, headed by Barney Frank.  One would think that this would be a good place strategically to put money, given the overlap of this district with the winnable SD-29 (Josh Newman vs. Ling Ling Chang) and AD-65 (Sharon Quirk-Silva vs. Young Kim).

CD 44 [not OC]

Over on the other side of Alan Lowenthal’s district, where Janice Hahn is giving up her Congressional seat to run for LA County Supervisor, Latina Nanette Barragan is a well-qualified reformer while on major and decisive issues African-American State Senator Isidore Hall voted a lot with Lou Correa.  Guess who OJB supports!  And look — it’s a real race, at least in terms of cash on hand!  Hall got 40% of the vote to Barragan’s 22% — but she split the vote with four other Latino Democrats who collectively received about 23%.  Probably the most important Congressional race among two Democrats in Southern California, with apologies to CD-46.

CD 45

Ron Varasteh could conceivably consolidate the anti-Mimi Walters vote in this district — the votes received by the second Democrat Max Gouron and the anti-machine Republican Greg Raths would put him past her — but his fundraising so far makes that unlikely.

CD 46

Here’s sort of a surprise.   Did you think that Lou Correa was a lock over Bao Nguyen?  Correa heavily outspent him in the primary — and while he’s gotten plenty of courtesy endorsements he doesn’t really have all that much more money. — a little over three times more than Bao.  And with Joe Dunn out of the picture, he can’t count on getting the same crushing level of independent expenditures in November.  Correa is still the favorite, of course, but as it stands Bao is not too badly positioned for an upset.

CD 47

Hint to underfunded challengers like Andy Whallon: if your cash-on-hand appears likely to land on the “Number of the Beast” for your quarterly report, either donate another dollar to yourself and bump it to $667 or use campaign funds to go buy a coke and get it down to $665.  (Or is this something that only Jews know how to avoid?)  Alan Lowenthal will not have to spend that money to retain his seat.  (How did Whallon amass that much debt — and why?)

CD 48

Time for Fun With Math!  Suzanne Savary is a darling of the DPOC crowd and will suck up a lot of money from Newport Beach, Costa Mesa, Irvine, and Laguna Beach.  Dana Rohrabacher — who is in electoral terms a Junior  Varsity version of Ed Royce — had 12.44 times the contributions (most of which, it was probably understood, would be going to other Republican candidates) of Savary and 13.8 times the expenditures.  Rohrabacher received $231,044 more than he took in — about $1,700 less than his June 30 cash on hand.  Savary received $22,086 more than she spent, about $1,300 more than her cash on hand.  What does that tell us?  I think it tells us to move onto CD-49.

CD 49

Doug Applegate is looking like a great candidate for CA-49 against unlikable mega-millionaire Darrell Issa.  He was recently added to the Democrats’ “Red to Blue” fundraising target list.  Issa got some lousy recent press saying that he hoped that the Democratic Party would spend $7,000,000 or so to make it a race.   And the $186,000+ he raised is more than double that of the other three OC Democrats challenging incumbents combined.  AND, Issa beat him by only 750 votes in San Diego County and 8,000 votes in OC, to beat him by 5.3% — 50.8% to 45.5% — as opposed to wins of 33.5% over the perfectly reasonable seeming Dave Peiser in the June 2014 primary and 30.4% over the perfectly reasonable seeming Jerry Tetalman.

Hey, it looks like people may finally be sick of Darrell Issa and his wasting of money on pointless political investigations!

When I ran for State Senate in 2012, fully believing that the best I could possibly do against the Minority Leader was a 10% loss (which was considered waaaaaayyyy optimistic by every political figure and analyst I encountered, I told people in Orange County that I would welcome their contributions, but that personally I didn’t see why someone would donate more than a token amount to me when they could donate it to the overlapping Assembly race in AD-65, where Sharon Quirk-Silva was a viable candidate, unless they were maxed out to her.  And I put in what I think was over half of my campaign money, after my filing fee and ballot statement, into rent for a downtown Fullerton office for the Democratic Coordinated campaign — which Sharon didn’t do, at first, expecting to work out of her Anaheim office, and which would not have been rented without my doing so — expecting that Sharon’s campaign would end up making a lot of use of it.  (And she did.  And she won.)

I guess what I’m saying is: would someone please show this to Suzanne Savary and ask her why she wants even a DIME this year that could be going to Doug Applegate?  If she weren’t a DPOC favorite, I expect that the leadership there would be making a compelling case to her that this isn’t her year, and that if it were Rohrabacher rather than Issa who had cratered in the primary they would be pushing Applegate to defer to her.  If I were her I think that I’d park myself in Costa Mesa and just make sure that Jay Humphries — and Sandy Genis, if the local Democrats will allow support of the rational reformist Republican —  in the race against Allan Mansoor and Steve Mensinger, so that that city can regain its economic and moral moorings.  We candidates are in this to serve the greater good — right?