Bluestem has the scoop.
Today, Congressman Tim Walz’s campaign released estimates of its fundraising numbers for the second quarter of 2008. Walz had his strongest quarter yet, with more than 2,500 individual contributors and raising more than $430,000, bringing cash on hand for the cycle to $1.2 million.
GOP endorsed candidate Brian Davis raised $290,000 in the second quarter and loaned himself an additional $100,000. That means that even if you include the six figure loan, Walz outraised Davis by at least $40k. His cash on hand lead is even more impressive - $1.2 million for Walz vs. $376k for Davis. Thats a 3-1 lead.
Davis’ primary challenger, Dick Day, has yet to report his fundraising totals, but I’d guess he’ll fall well below Davis’ totals. In fact, despite promising to do so just last week, Day has yet to file for office and some are speculating that he won’t (though to be fair, Davis and Walz have yet to file as well).
Bottom line: Davis’ fundraising is impressive, but its just not enough to make this a competitive race in such a DFL year.
The
FEC Report is available here.
Davis raised 268k from individuals, got another 20k from party units and PACs and put in 2k himself. Not bad.
The big news, if I am reading this report correctly, is that Davis loaned his campaign an adittional 100k. Thats on top of the loans he made earlier in the cycle.
Davis has $376,000 cash on hand. That’s a good sum for a challenger. Too bad he’ll have to spend a lot of it fighting Dick Day in the primary. Oh, and don’t forget that Tim Walz had a million dollars in the bank as of April.
I just spoke with Chris Schmitter Tim Walz’s campaign manager and he called the "report" in
Checks & Balances (subscription required)
completely false .
The Congressman is neutral in this race, he is focused doing his job for the people of Southern Minnesota, he is not encouraging Ciresi to get in and he is not playing a role in this race at all.
Bluestem has the scoop, a new poll by the Benenson Strategy Group shows Tim Walz with massive leads over his two Republican challengers:
Walz - 60%
Davis - 20%
Walz - 57%
Day - 22%
No big surprise here, Walz is going to blow these guys out of the water.
Hope you guys enjoyed being a swing state, because that era seems to be coming to close. Obama has led McCain by double digit margins in recent polls and both campaigns have been sending signals that Minnesota will not be a critical battleground this fall.
Today, in his regular ranking of state’s most likely to move from red to blue or blue to red this fall, the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza doesn’t even place Minnesota in the top ten. Six weeks ago, Cillizza ranked Minnesota a 7th. Our drop is no doubt due to Barack Obama’s all but certain clinching of the Democratic nomination. Obama is widely considered to be a stronger candidate in Minnesota than Hillary Clinton.
If Republicans do in fact chose not to contest Minnesota in the presidential race, it will be a massive boon for the DFL up and down the ballot. Currently, the presidential race is the only level where the Republicans are financially comptetitive. The DSCC and DCCC, on the other hand, have massive cash advantages over their Republican counterparts. If McCain and the RNC pull out of Minnesota, Madia, Walz and all the other DFL candidates will be enormously benefitted.
Bluestem has the goods. Congressman Tim Walz sent a letter to Education Secretary Margaret Spellings regarding
her visit to Minnesota this week.
Madam Secretary, what was troubling about your visit was that you came to Minnesota to announce a pilot project that will not help Minnesota’s students and schools. I think it is important for you to address the fundamental question of why you would come to Minnesota to announce a policy that doesn’t help Minnesota students.
Kudos to Walz for trying to get to the bottom of this. I think, however, Walz’s questions might also be asked of Norm Coleman and Tim Pawlenty.
Good news for Tim Walz:
State Sen. Dick Day will skip over the Republican party endorsement and run in a primary in Minnesota’s 1st Congressional District.
Day says he wants the voters to decide which Republican challenges Democratic U.S. Representative Tim Walz.
Day says the September primary election is more democratic than letting a few hundred GOP activists pick the candidate at a district convention.
Contested primaries aren’t always a bad thing, they can increase name recognition and give campaigns a chance to test drive their field operation. In this, however, a contested primary is a VERY bad thing for the MN GOP. Why? One word: money. Check out the 4th quarter filings for CD 1 candidates:
Dick Day (R)
Raised - $53 k
Spent - $37k
Cash on Hand - $96k
Randy Demmer (R)
Raised - $35k
Spent - $49k
Cash on Hand - $42k
Brian Davis (R)
Raised - $59k
Spent - $51k
Cash on Hand - $85k
Congressman Tim Walz (DFL)
Raised - $250k
Spent - $119k
Cash on Hand - $793k
The three Republicans have pathetic numbers compared to Walz, and now they are going to blow what little cash they have on a primary. To make matters worse, the winner of this primary can’t count on any help from the cash-strapped NRCC, which is goign to be busy defending open seats like the 3rd.
This race is over.
Although Joe Bodell’s blog falls
disappointingly low on the ‘snarky wonkishness’ scale it shouldn’t diminish the fact that every now and then he has some pretty awesome content up over there.
Anatomy of a Special Election Victory: SD25
DFLer Kevin Dahle emerged victorious in a special election this week to replace State Sen. Tom Neuville. Dahle prevailed against a well-funded, well-known Republican in the person of former State Rep. Ray Cox, who served half the district in the Legislature for several years until going down to defeat in 2006.
Dahle’s victory has set off a string of recriminations among Republican Party activists, one side accusing the other of not helping enough and the other complaining about a closed process that produced a weak candidate. In the mix are (of course) remonstrations that the DFL played negative politics to the bitter end on behalf of Dahle. Senator-elect Dahle, for his part, managed to stay positive throughout the short campaign, and now heads to St. Paul as part of a veto-proof majority.
Go check out some great analysis on why the DFL now has a VETO PROOF MAJORITY(!) in the State Senate — but remember who sent ya.
[update:] Another stellar write up from Ollie Ox at Bluestem Prairie. I don’t have a Google News Alert for Tim Walz anymore — I just go to Bluestem Prairie. Her coverage of this southern MN race was bananas too, stop by and give her a read.
John Kline (Doofus — MN02) has announced that he won’t take any more earmarks in appropriations bills.
This is just plain cockamamie, and I can only hope it’s shortly followed by ‘I, John Kline, will be resigning from the United States House of Representatives because I have decided that I no longer want to take part in the most paramount of Congressional responsibilities, holding the purse strings for our country. I am also a nimrod.’
We’ll discuss more of this later, but first, I’d like to take a second to wag the finger at the Star Tribune.
The three pictures below are screen shots of the Star Tribune’s website taken approximately at 4pm today. (click on each to see bigger versions) This pretty fricking important story is found once on the front page, in an easily lost link on the left side — to the Strib’s “McMemo” political blog (see the arrow in the first). You must click on the “National Politics” section to find a link to the story, where it doesn’t get headlines — no — a 6 day old story about one of Tim Walz’s opponents graces the top of the Politically Connected/National Politics/US House section; the link is further down the screen on both the generic National Politics page, and even further down the screen on the National Politics/US House page.
Crap guys. Crap.
In Washington, state’s delegations to Congress occasionally meet together to discuss issues that affect their state and to plan. I can only venture that the next Minnesota Delegation meeting is going to be a little awkward.
We pimped the Walz-Kline showdown on Friday , and it was great television.
If you missed it, it can be found here at TPT (click on the link at right that says “Congressional Tussel Over Funding the New 35W”).
After showing how Republicans overspent in their first six years under President Bush, Tim Walz punctuated his opening statement with “[The Republicans], would rather build bridges in Iraq than here.” Representative Kline clearly a little preturbed at this, hit back at one of Walz’s personal causes, Veterans.
It was at this moment, I was reminded that Walz is a teacher. Because he took Kline to school.
Watch Minnesota Nice inter-delegation scrap here.
I’ve already noted that tonight’s Almanac is going to feature a debate between John Kline and Tim Walz, but I just found out about another
big story coming up on TPT…
A couple of week’s ago we caught up with former Republican House Speaker Steve Sviggum teaching in the classroom. Tonight we get to see “Anthony the Actor” that is Sertich embracing his theater major. We get to see him in make up and tights (just a peak) as a thespian. Sertich also shares come exciting personal news with us. He was a great sport and I think it’ll be fun for viewers to see the majority leader’s comedic timing and wit in action. Tune in to Sertich in an Oscar award-winning movie!
This should be good. Too bad Matt and I won’t be able to watch it live (funny, they don’t broadcast Minnesota public affairs programming in Virgnina or Pennsylvania) so we’ll have to wait until they put it up online.
UPDATE: A dedicated reader of MNpublius has informed us that the personal announcement promised by Mary LaHammer is that Tony Sertich has proposed to his long-time girlfriend. If this is true, no doubt that this is a very sad day for many female staffers at the capitol. MNpublius is a huge fan of the majority leader and (if this is true) would like to extend our sincere congratulations to future Congressman State Rep. Sertich.
Tim Walz will debate John Kline on TPT’s Almanac tonight. The two Congressmen are on to talk about federal transportation policy and the 35W bridge collapse.
(H/T Bluestem Prairie)
PS - We could have also called this the debate between the next Governor and the next Gil Gutknecht.
These guys are pathetic.
We already reported that prospective Walz challenger St. Rep. Randy Demmer raised just $17k in the 3rd Quarter. Now the Star Tribune is reporting that St. Sen. Dick Day raised $40k. To put these numbers in perspective, St. Sen. Terri Bonoff, who is running in the 3rd CD, raised $88.5k, or more than double Day’s total for the whole quarter, in just ten days.
Quite simply, these FEC Reports indicate that Demmer and Day are not credible candidates. In a normal year, an successful challenge to an incumbent Congressman costs upwards of $1 million. It would take Day six years to raise that much money at his current rate.
Rochester physician Brian Davis raised $81k, a number that would be semi-respectable for a second-tier House race, but is pretty feeble for a race that the GOP wants to pretend is one of their top pickup opportunities.
Congressman Walz, on the other hand, raised $311k and has over $700k cash on hand.
This race just dropped into the bottom half of the second tier of House races in the country. Walz is now a clear favorite for reelection.
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