A report issued yesterday by the Federal Election Commission shows what happens when congressional candidates actually face competitive elections, as they are this year: spending goes up. It’s up by 36% overall from two years ago, the report found – a significant two-year jump even in the world of political campaigning.
The FEC report is based on reports filed by the campaigns through October 18, the final reporting deadline for congressional candidates before Election Day.
Continue readingWhy should investigative reporters have all the fun?
Sunlight today is unveiling a new website – Watchdogging 101. It’s a collection of more than 20 illustrated tutorials that give step-by-step instructions on where and how to dig out information on the web about money and influence in national politics.
It’s all presented in a Q&A format and the questions run the gamut from the most basic – Who’s my Congressman? – to more complicated issues like tracking industry giving and finding out who’s lobbying for whom.
Continue readingJust a week before Election Day, the nation’s biggest archive of information on who’s paying the bills for the 2006 election is closed to the public. A computer glitch knocked the Center for Responsive Politics’ Open Secrets website off the air last Friday. It’s been offline ever since, and is still offline as I write this early Tuesday morning.
I’m not going to suggest that this is some election-eve conspiracy, but if it were it could hardly have come at a more critical time. This is the equivalent of Macy’s closing its doors for four days in the middle of the Christmas shopping season.
Continue readingWe've already got two separate items linked on the reported investigations of Rep. Rick Renzi, R-Ariz. One concerns his involvement in a land swap deal that made a $3 million profit for James Sandlin, a a real estate investor who'd bought half of a business owned by Renzi for $200,000 in 2001 (Sandlin would later buy the rest for somewhere between $1,000,001 and $5 million). The second story notes an inquiry into Renzi's influence on behalf of a government contractor, Mantech International, of which his father is an executive vice president.
Continue readingJohn Podhoretz draws a distinction, in his New York Post column, between those who get their information from the awkwardly-named "Mainstream Media" (I prefer traditional media) and those who follow (or follow, in addition to newspaper and television) political blogs and Web sites, and hypothesizes that the latter are getting a much different election picture than the former. Those on "Blog Time," Podhoretz argues, are more attuned to subtle or even significant shifts of voter zeitgeist: Rep. Harold Ford had a bad week; Republicans have put the worst of the ongoing Foley mess behind them; this district's latest poll looks good for the incumbent, and so on so forth. Those on "Mainstream Media Time," by contrast, are getting fed a steady diet of one way stories suggesting that Republicans are in trouble, according to Podhoretz.
Continue readingAfter readings Bill's post about this convetional wisdom-bucking Barron's article predicting that the Republicans will hold onto to both Houses I decided to take a look at the same numbers that they were looking at. First let's look at the campaign finance information since that's how they decided to pick the winner of each individual race. Instead of looking at the numbers of every race I decided to use the National Journal's recently released House Race Rankings. I've discounted Democratic seats that they list because we're talking about the Republican Party holding off a Democratic challenge and so I looked the defensive position of the majority party. This is based data released by the FEC on October 20, 2006 and compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics.
When I first glanced at it, I didn't quite know what to make of Jim McTague's prediction in Barrons, or his system for arriving at it: that incumbents with big fundraising advantages will win their races. McTague thus argues that the GOP will hold Congress, that incumbents with bad poll numbers or in tight races like Sen. Conrad Burns in Montana or Sen. Robert Menendez in New Jersey will ride their campaign chests to victory, and that raising the most money is a sign of "superior grass-roots support."
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Today’s the monthly reporting deadline for political party committees at the Federal Election Commission – the second-to-last report we’ll get before election day. In anticipation, there’ve been a flurry of news stories this week focusing on the flow of money as a way of analyzing the horse race.
Wednesday’s story by Jim VandeHei in the Washington Post – “Funding Constrains Democrats” – was particularly illuminating, as it revealed both a hunger for more money and a split among Democrats in how to husband the resources they’ve got. As VandeHei explained it:
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The Washington Post is reporting today that GOP candidates in close congressional races have a big advantage in campaign funds over the Democrats that are trying to send them packing. While this isn’t exactly a surprising revelation – in fact, the opposite would be real page one news – it’s at least one bright note for the party’s beleaguered standard-bearers in a year that’s probably not going to go their way.
Does it matter? Personally, I don’t think so. I’d argue – as I did a couple of weeks ago – that in this year’s political climate, it’s not the spending difference between the candidates that so important. Rather, it’s the amount of money raised by the challenger.
Continue reading...to personal uses, it appears that Sen. Harry Reid, hot on the heels of amending his financial disclsoure reports to accurately report the details of a land deal, has also decided to reimburse his campaign $3,300 after using it as a petty cash stash to donate to a fund that buys Christmas gifts for the support staff who work in the building (which happens to be a Ritz-Carlton) where he has his Washington area home. Incidentally, I tend to be much closer to the Captain Ed Morissey view of this--that additional spade work is warrented--as opposed to the Paul Kiel view--that the Associated Press's initial story doesn't add up.
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