Two other blogs, .08 Acres and A Donkey and RichardHowe.com are both citing a Lowell Sun article regarding 1st quarter fundraising by the Democratic candidates in the race to succeed outgoing Rep. Marty Meehan.
From .08 Acres:
Eileen Donoghue $400,000
Nikki Tsongas $325,000
Barry Finegold $310,000
Jamie Eldridge $105,000
James Miceli Unknown
James DiPaola $0
David O’Brien $0
Where’s the loot coming from?
The article states that Donoghue is likely self-financing a large part of her campaign through a personal contribution of up to $350,000. Eldridge says he raised his money primarily from large numbers of small donors. Tsongas no doubt raised much of her money from wealthy and institutional donors. Feingold’s figures are impressive, except that the rumor is that $310K he has is mostly from his exploratory committee he set up years ago when it looked like Meehan wouldn’t be running for Congress to perhaps run for Governor- meaning it’s mostly “old” money. [UPDATE (by David): a source in the Finegold campaign tells BMG that only about $6,000 of “old” money was transferred to Finegold’s campaign account. So most of his $310K is new money, raised in the last few weeks.]
Another place to look over the last few weeks has been ActBlue.org. Up until recently, Jamie Eldridge was dominating contributions on that site. Tsongas, over the weekend, eclipsed him, perhaps as a sign that she’s taking his campaign as a serious threat to hers and is directing her donors to contribute there.
Perhaps time will tell…
as of the time stamp of this post:
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Jamie Eldridge 100 donors $32,946.07
Barry Finegold 16 donors $16,250.00
Niki Tsongas 110 donors $44,525.00
If you are going to contribute to the race, I recommend you do it through ActBlue. It’s a real netroots type organization, and it’s a small step toward keeping finances closer to those roots…
That’s a pretty striking data point in this race, if indeed the narrative is that Tsongas has the institutional support versus a grassroots campaign. Thanks for posting this, stomv.
After all, the limit is $4600 right ($2.3k primary + $2.3k general)? So, that could be 2 donors using ActBlue instead of writing a check.
As far as I know, ActBlue aggregates the data… it doesn’t break it down.
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As a side note, it does update the data instantly, not in batches. So, you could conceivably write a script to grab the page every t time units and subtract the changes. If only one person donated in that time interval (which you’d know because it reports the number of donors) you’d know the dollar value of the donation too.
or is it The Lowell Sun that is saying that Tsongas is raising her money “from wealthy and institutional donors”? I’m curious as to where this information is coming from.
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I have contributed to her campaign and I am neither wealthy nor institutional.
and I have no idea about their personal politics, but I’m happy to see some women in the mix.