I looked at the October campaign finance reports for Congress and Senate last week, but didn’t include CD18 because they had a later deadline for reporting. Today we get to catch up on that. The April reports for Congress and Senate, including CD18, are here and July reports are here.
Amanda Edwards – CD18
Isaiah Martin – CD18
Christian Menefee – CD18
Jolanda Jones – CD18
Zoe Cadore – CD18
Stephen Huey – CD18
Carmen Montiel – CD18
Reyna Anderson – CD18
George Foreman – CD18
Dist Name Raised Spent Loans On Hand
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18 Edwards 1,266,234 935,649 0 331,798
18 Martin 1,054,745 961,677 0 267,702
18 Menefee 1,539,610 1,146,989 0 392,621
18 Jones 341,647 314,313 0 27,333
18 Cadore 266,557 225,298 0 41,259
18 Huey 37,856 26,092 0 11,764
18 Montiel 61,173 41,065 0 20,551
18 Anderson 8,225 3,616 0 4,608
18 Foreman 8,453 758 0 7,694
This list is of all of the candidates who are on the Erik Manning spreadsheet and who reported raising something between July 1 and October 23. Carmen Montiel is a Republican, Reyna Anderson and George Foreman are independents, the rest are Dems. Zoe Cadore dropped out before the filing deadline but did submit an updated October report, showing about $33K raised above what she had as of July.
Lots of money raised in this race. I think I’m most impressed by Isaiah Martin, who is the only person among the top four who had no previous electoral experience. That’s a good job of building a network right there, and whatever happens in this race it will position him well, whether in a future campaign of his own or if he wants to launch a PAC or the like. Jolanda Jones had about six weeks to raise money after the end of the last special session, which is undoubtedly why her total is so much lower than the others. The main thing there is that this would put her at a disadvantage going into the runoff if she makes it. Given that the runoff would be no earlier than January and might not be until February, and given her high name ID, that will be mitigated to some extent. It’s still something to keep in mind.
Beyond the top four there’s not much to say. I never took seriously the earlier polls that had Carmen Montiel at roughly the same level of support as the Edwards/Menefee/Jones cluster. The two most recent polls have her down at around six percent, which is probably too low but much more likely to me than in the range of the top two. She doesn’t have the name or the resources to drive anyone who wasn’t already voting to the polls. In a Presidential year, that’s good for 20-25% in the district, just from the environment. In an election like this, she’ll be listed under “Others making an appearance”. You can say the same for George Foreman, who would have been harder for me to minimize if he’d raised, say, $100K or so, enough to run some web and radio ads and capitalize on his famous name. He may get a stray vote or two from people who happened to be voting for some other reason and to their surprise learned that this race was on their ballot as well. I don’t expect more than that.
The Chron ran a story about some of the CD18 candidates you’ve never heard of, which included Montiel, Foreman, Stephen Huey – who as you can see did at least raise a few bucks; he lives in the Heights and I’ve seen a sign or two for him – and a couple of others but not everyone. If you can’t be bothered to run an actual campaign, which includes both raising money so you can have the resources to inform people about your candidacy and filing the reports as required about the money you raised and spent, I’m not interested in finding out about you. I’ll stick to the candidates who are making that effort.