Election Day is next Tuesday, and candidates have (mostly) now filed their eight day reports, which is the last look we’ll get at how they’re doing campaign finance-wise before the votes are counted. I don’t have the time or the interest to review everyone’s eight day reports, but I did want to check in on the Mayoral candidates, so here we go. The July reports for this group are here, and the 30 day reports are here.
Candidate Raised Spent Loan On Hand
======================================================
Whitmire 520,040 3,328,772 0 4,266,473
JacksonLee 333,226 1,128,102 0 108,128
G Garcia 348,640 1,930,037 0 72,588
Kaplan 57,551 948,870 400,000 124,034
Khan 3,510 137,954 24,450 32,786
A Garcia
Gallegos 1,000 14,544 0 131,833
Christie
Houjami 760 605 0 11
Mbala 0 0 0 118
Williams 51,000 0 0 51,000
I didn’t spend any time scrolling through these reports to see who spent what on what, but this Chron story gets into some of that if you’re interested. Suffice it to say that those who are spending are spending on advertising. You can find all of these reports, along with all of the others from this cycle that I have reviewed, in this folder.
Jack Christie submitted a report with no summary information, though he did include all of the relevant individual sub-reports. I didn’t bother doing the manual addition for everything, but he raised a minimal amount, spent some $200K+ on advertising, and loaned himself more money – the report shows a total of $300K in outstanding loans, up from the $214K from the 30-dat report, with $200K of that coming in the time period for the report. I’m not sure whether this means another $200K tacked on to the previous total or if this is a consolidation of some kind. Sure would be nice to have those summary pages.
Annie Garcia did not submit a report as of yesterday, so we have no idea what if anything she may have done with the $1.5 million she reported having loaned to herself in the 30-day. If she has spent any of it on ads, they have not been visible to me.
One thing that the Chron story correctly notes is that anyone in the race would be at a huge financial disadvantage in the runoff against Whitmire and his remaining millions of cash on hand. Sheila Jackson Lee (or anyone else, but let’s be clear that it will be SJL) will be able to raise cash in the runoff, but so would Whitmire. There are also outside groups, for both SJL and Whitmire, that are spending and will spend more, but nothing that changes the fundamentals. I don’t see anything to alter this dynamic. SJL will just need to strategize for a race in which she will be vastly outspent.
I could be wrong, but I get the sense that Robert Gallegos has kind of checked out on this race. He’s just not spending any money. Not that he has a ton to spend, but what could he be holding that $131K for? One possibility is a run for another office in the future. There is one that has come open in recent days, so who knows. Please note that all of this is 100% speculation on my part.
Since I needled Lee Kaplan about his lack of advertising as of the 30 day report, I will note that I have received a couple of mailers from him in the past week or so. Well done, sir.
That’s probably it with the reports for now, though I will probably check them out for the runoff. Let me know what you think.
Kaplan has an attack ad up against Whitmire. It was airing during the 5:00 news slot.
Gallegos would make a great State Representative.
In whose slot would he make a great Rep?