I just got an email from Elizabeth Warren’s campaign that says she’s raised more than $3 million for her Senate run. The email says 96% of contributions were below $100 and 11,000 contributions came from Massachusetts residents. While Scott Brown has yet to release Q3 numbers, this give Warren almost 3X of the haul of her closest fellow Democrat, Alan Khazei.
UPDATE: Noah Bierman at the Globe is reporting that Scott Brown raked in $1.55 million, & has $10.5 million on hand. Although we cannot compare cash on hand w/ Warren as she has not released her full report (we’ll know by the 15th), this means that Brown spent $600,000 during Q3. While spending money at this point is not unusual, it does seem odd that Brown is spending so much so far ahead of the actual election. On second thought, there were lots of “Defend Scott Brown” ads after Warren announced & her social contract video came out.
will have to start supporting other candidates. Sure I want a Dem senator in MA, but I want some more Dem senators (and reps) elsewhere too!
the only potential Democratic pickup in the Senate this year. It’s worth a little extra effort.
The Silver State Seat once occupied by the disgraced John Ensign is eminently winnable, too. However, as in Massachusetts it will be a fight. Barring a titanic collapse of the Republican party in Texas there is no place likely to flip red to blue…except maybe, MAYBE Utah, but Jim Mathieson would probably be another Ben Nelson.
Now that Mr. Massie is out of the race, I haven’t decided who to support. It seems all but concluded that Ms. Warren will easily win the nomination. Whatever I decide isn’t likely to make much difference unless Ms. Warren makes a critical error. The powers that be in Washington who recruited her to run can direct to her, as described in the post, an astonishing level of funding. The Globe and Herald are clearly on her side – for the primary anyway.
I find this huge influence from “above” discouraging in that I wonder what the D.C. people will expect from Ms. Warren in return. Will she be able to act as independently as she sounds now when speaking up for the middle class? Don’t get me wrong, I hope the answer is yes. It seems obvious to me that one reason for the flood of money engineered from outside is to get back the seat in order to shore up the Democratic majority. What this process of recruiting and promoting Ms. Warren tells me is that D.C. has/had little confidence in the ability of the other candidates to beat Scott Brown, or that D.C. simply did not like any of them.
To support my statement about money engineered from outside, do the math. Assuming that of the 11,000 contributions from MA, 96% of these were $100 or less, as is said about all contributions. Assume that the average of these is $75. I think I’m being generous here. This comes to $792,000 from small in-state donors, leaving $2.358 million as coming from either out of MA or from large donations. I think it is safe to say that some of the in-state donations were influenced by nationwide groups who virtually ignored the other primary candidates.
Another aspect of the Warren primary advantage that bothers me is the simultaneous piling on that I saw from several independent progressive organizations, namely MoveOn, PCCC (Progressive Change Campaign Committee), CREDO mobile, and to a lesser extent Democracy for America. Each of the first three groups sent me emails, in approximately the same time period, extolling the candidacy of EW and providing a link for donations. They made no mention of the other candidates. If I were from outside MA, I would not have known that there were any other people running in the primary. Because of these actions, these groups have lost all credibility for me. I will not donate any money to their organizations. I will also not donate to any of their preferred candidates without first checking for the existence of another progressive primary opponent.
i was at first surprised at how the progressive groups all independently decided at the same time to support EW and solicit donations. There are reasons to suspect that this was coordinated. One of these is the existence of a group named the Common Purpose Project, which is described as follows in an article in Politico:
Democracy for America is a slightly different case because they took a poll of their members before endorsing Ms. Warren. This is better than the others, but they took little trouble to encourage members to inform themselves about all the candidates before weighing in. Also, a national poll was just about certain to favor Ms. Warren due to her name recognition.
None of my about statements are intended to be a negative reflection on Ms. Warren herself, who does a commendable job of articulating the financial plight of the middle class. Nor are they directed at people who decided to support EW after seriously considering all the other candidates. They express my concern about the undue influence that powerful players in Washington exert over who runs, who gets press coverage, and possibly even who gets the endorsement of supposedly independent progressive groups.
Look, I’m sorry that your primary candidate didn’t make it.
I’ve had about enough of the whining about “the D.C. people”. The GOP/TeaParty/Corporate machine is MASSIVELY organized, MASSIVELY funded, and tightly controlled.
I want the political groups that I end up being aligned with most of the time — moveon.org, credo, DfA, etc — to talk and I want them to talk frequently. If they have the ear of the President, so much the better.
When those groups catch the scent of a liberal-leaning populist phenomenon like Elizabeth Warren, I want them to fan the flames and spread the word. I’m sick to death of being besieged by Joe-The-Plumber, Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachmann, and the rest of the right-wing circus troupe. I want the mainstream middle class voters of my country to have have a political voice other than Rush Limbaugh that our government fears.
We are in a decades-long pitched battle for the heart and soul of America. We have hunkered down and hidden from the relentless assaults of the right wing for decades. When a leader and warrior emerges who has the energy, ability, and most of all passion to lead the charge, I want us to get behind that person.
It’s tough enough to put up with the grousing from the Scott Brown camp about the “elitist” campaign of Elizabeth Warren without hearing echoes of the same grousing from our own side.
Elizabeth Warren is catching fire. She is catching fire among the Occupy Everything movement, she is catching fire here in Massachusetts, she is catching fire among those who want to fight back against the relentless class warfare being waged against virtually EVERYONE, and she is catching fire among the media and the liberal-leaning national organizations. Most importantly, the GOP sees that she is catching fire and is scared sh**less as a result.
I like that. I’m sorry you don’t.
Groups associated with the Common Purpose Project lose their independence in order to gain access to the White House’s information line. When have these groups last said anything critical of the president? I can’t recall. The White House representative did not say she was attending their meetings in order to allow these groups to have the ear of the president. She said she was attending in order to “manage the relationship”. You may interpret that as you wish. I interpret it as the White House getting the groups to say mostly nice things about Obama and minimize their mentioning the many ways in which he has been a disappointment to progressives.
What I hear you saying is that you trust MoveOn, DFA, etc to tilt the primary playing field by failing to even acknowledge the presence of other candidates in the race. You don’t seem to understand that I actually like Elizabeth Warren. I am acquiring a less favorable view of the people in power who are promoting her. Why couldn’t they acknowledge the presence of other progressive candidates but say that they thought Ms. Warren would make the best candidate, for reasons X, Y, and Z? What is so bad about a more open decision process?
I disagree with your concerns about dissent within our party. There is plenty of time to speak with one voice once a primary is over. I am more concerned about the influence of money coming from outside an electoral district. There have been plenty of cases where a populist local Democratic candidate has been trumped by a more conservative one who was showered with out of state money. This was a problem before the Citizens United decision and it will only be worse going forward. You can call my concern sour grapes but I was an advocate of campaign finance reform for many years before I changed my registration from unenrolled to Democratic. A level playing field is not a new concern for me.
Once the primary is over I of course want the party to help the general election candidate. I plan to get behind the Democratic candidate. I think that whoever we send to the general will be a better candidate if that person first gets to rehearse in a robust primary.
Like you, I hope whoever wins the Democratic nomination catches enough fire to win in the general.
Perhaps I wasn’t clear.
I have no concerns about dissent, I’m not saying I trust anybody.
I am, instead, saying that I believe that an enormous number of Americans are in pain and are hungry for the kind of leader that Elizabeth Warren seems to be. In my view, the blossoming of support and enthusiasm for her speaks to that and is — finally and belatedly — catching the power brokers by surprise.
I want the White House to feel that they need to “manage” this movement. Good — they’ve been sitting on their complacent butts long past long enough. I want the groups like moveon to be scrambling to figure out how to keep up. I want we on the liberal left to be energized, motivated, and fired up.
The Occupy Everything movement is happening NOW, not after the primary. There’s a reason why the other Massachusetts candidates are not featured on the viral spots that are spreading so rapidly. Sometimes things happen on their own, and the job of an organization is to keep up. The momentum is NOW, the time is NOW, and Bob Massie recognized that when he so graciously pulled out of this race.
When I say that I’m tired of the whining, I mean that I’ve had enough of belly-aching about things that, in my view, pale in comparison to the opportunity that awaits us if we will but seize the moment.
than I do. Obama is “centrist”, not liberal. Not as bad as Republican, but too conciliatory to outrageous Republican demands and not tough enough on the banks.
Call me a whiner, or whatever. I’ll be delighted if the Occupy movement manages to overcome the insidious influence of corporate money on both parties.
I doubt that all of them are caught by surprise. Chuck Schumer is rumored to be one of the people who recruited EW to run. That’s not how I would like it, that’s reality. I hope she remains true to her values.
This haul is impressive. Did they release the figures yet for Khazei and Conroy?
I did donate to EWarren, and it’s mainly because I see her as having great progressive credibility AND the potential to beat Scott Brown. I really like Tom Conroy as well, and his staff are awesome people, but this race will require a lot of out of state money (as Brown will get that as well), and I think Warren is the best equipped for that, as her fiscals prove.