While I usually leave everything related to the 3rd District, Adrian Smith, or Western Nebraska to our wonderful friends over at SmithWatch… I just couldn’t help but point out the obvious (well obvious if you’re a geek like me who like to read FEC Fundraising Numbers).
Adrian Smith, the brand-new Republican congressman from the 3rd, just can’t seem to get very good at fundraising. You see, when running for Congress lots of people want to give you money; especially when you’re a Republican in a very Republican district like Smith was. Which was why it was suprising that Smith wasn’t able to raise much much more than he did last time around. That left many of us to speculate that he just isn’t very good at raising money.
Now that doesn’t make him a bad congressman (if you want to know why he’s a bad congressman, just spend ten minutes over at SmithWatch yourself)… I can think of a number of Democratic candidates who weren’t very good at raising money but who I love dearly.
But it could be a problem for Adrian if he still can’t raise any money. You see, when you’re a first term congressman people really love to give you money. Now that Smith is in Congress he should be able to raise lots of easy dollars every two years from PACs of companies affected by the committee he sits on. The corrupt way this works is one of the big reasons Jim Esch pledged not to take PAC money last time around… but I digress.
But in the last quarter, Smith only raised $104,000… not counting his $30k in debt left over from the last campaign. That means Smith’s Cash On Hand (CoH) is only about $65,000… compare that to Lee Terry’s $215k CoH.
So is Scott Kleeb going to step up and run again? Well, Scott still has nearly as much in the bank as Smith did, at $64k.
Run Scott! Run!