The Iowa caucuses are tonight and Super Tuesday primaries are now a month away. Slate’s Molly Olmstead provides a briefing on how the archaic caucus process works — in Iowa, at least. Speculation on how the Iowa caucuses will shake out for Democrats is pointless, but it will fill cable news hours between now and when we actually know anything tonight.
February’s arrival brings with it groundhogs and candidates’ Federal Election Commission filings from the fourth quarter of 2019 (due by the end of January). Open Secrets’ Anna Massoglia else was checking out Donald Trump’s October though December filing over the weekend. No surprise, Trump is using campaign donations to line his family’s pockets.
This news is nearly lost in the crush of Iowa reporting and stories about the remaining Senate impeachment proceedings. Since we are numbed to Trump’s self-dealing, the New York Times mentioned Trump’s campaign profits Saturday almost as a footnote:
The Trump campaign spent about $194,000 at Trump-owned properties. The filings show that the groups supporting Mr. Trump’s re-election together made 150 separate payments to Trump-owned entities and properties, totaling nearly $600,000 for the three-month period, and $1.7 million for the year.
Most of the campaign’s spending went to digital ads, but there was also $1.4 million in legal fees the campaign spent to defend Trump from various legal actions against him. Some of those legal fees went to the Trump Organization.
I spent Sunday morning examining filings from some federal candidates in North Carolina. Five Democrats have filed to contest the NC-11 seat Republican Mark Meadows is vacating. The U.S. Senate race against incumbent Republican Thom Tillis has four Democrats running. The Super Tuesday primary on March 3rd should settle who will run in November, but cash-on-hand is a leading indicator — though not necessarily of the candidate’s qualifications for the job.
Like it or not, the ability to raise money is as much a measure of a candidate’s viability as how many people will stand in her/his corner of a gymnasium on a cold winter’s night in Iowa.
Many a rookie candidate files for office unaware of what it takes to be competitive. A friend once asked me to drop by the event of a Democrat running for Congress in bright-red South Carolina. They were under a pop-up in an empty parking lot. The candidate’s wife had heard I’d been involved with a congressional race before. She asked with hesitation how much it cost.
If you have to ask…. This was not going to go well, so I low-balled and said, “1.1.”
“Million?” she asked in a dejected tone.
That was then. As I reported last May, the average cost for a Democrat to flip a congressional seat in 2018 was $5.5 million.
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