The Fighting 29th

All about New York's 29th Congressional District

The FEC has released the final money numbers for the 29th. Eric Massa out-raised and out-spent Randy Kuhl by small margins. When third-party contributions are added to the mix, Massa and MoveOn.org outspent the Kuhl campaign by almost $200K.

The graph at the right shows the contributor mix for the campaign. Massa raised a little over $1 million from individual contributors. Kuhl's largest contributors were Political Action Committees, and he raised almost $1 million from them. The "other" category in this graph represents contributions from party and also from the candidate. Massa contributed $41K to this campaign, and loaned it another $56K, which has since been repaid.

For the spending picture, I lumped third-party expenditures with candidate expenditures. The main third-party expenditure was the $139K spent by MoveOn.org to attack Randy Kuhl. I show that as an expenditure for Massa, though technically MoveOn is a third party.

I'll post later on the significance of these numbers, since it's not often that a challenger out-raises and out-spends an opponent in a race like this, especially in a supposedly "red" district. Keep in mind one important point when interpreting the charts: Massa ran a two-year campaign, since he declared his candidacy in November, 2004. So even though he did out-spend Kuhl, he did so over two years. Kuhl didn't being to spend seriously on his campaign until Summer, 2006.