Both Tom Reed and Eric Massa filed their FEC fundraising reports yesterday.
Reed raised $87K and has a total of $122K cash on hand. His report shows that he raised about $60K from individuals, chipped in $16K himself, and got a little over $10K from PACs and party.
Massa's haul was $261K, with $222K of that total from individuals, and the rest from party and PACs. Massa's report shows that he has $643K cash on hand.
Massa has raised a little over a million dollars this cycle. Reed has raised less than a quarter of that amount ($222K). Almost all of Reed's contributions have come from individual donors. Massa's gotten about 60% of his total from individuals. In other words, even if you subtracted out PAC financing, Massa would have almost a 3:1 fundraising advantage over Reed.
Comments
Reed's Cash on Hand only went up like $5k... Republicans have got to be walking away from this race. All he's done is stick his foot in his mouth, and it's clear that he's not going to fundraise.
I think Reed made a mistake to drop his bid for a 2nd term as mayor - he doesn't have what it takes to run for Congress.
For real, that filing is abysmal. The GOP needs to find a primary opponent if they want a chance at massa.
I agree. The ideal primary opponent would be an independent aligned candidate who is younger than both Reed and Massa. He or she would not be entrenched in the party machine. It appears to me that the eight republican chairs in our district sat around a table and decided that Reed is the only Republican the people have to choose from. It flies in the face of democracy and common sense that they unilaterally endorsed him 18 months prior to the general election. I'm voting Matt Kernan! Seriously though, I hope Reed is primaried by an unknown unknown. Everyone will be caught off guard.
One issue in NY is that primaries are so close to the general that it's hard to raise the kind of money an unknown needs for the general between the primary and the general. Look at Illinois -- they're having primaries today. In that environment, a unknown unknown (to use your Rumsfeldian phrase) would have a good chance to run a serious campaign if they had an upset victory. It's tougher in NY.