Here’s the Chron story on the 30 days out finance reports. It discusses the disparity in cash on hand totals between Annise Parker, Peter Brown, and Gene Locke.
“[Parker’s] got a challenge to compete on the airwaves down the home stretch,” said Keir Murray, a Houston political consultant. “It just puts you in a position to scramble as a campaign if your opponents are on television and you can’t match them. It’s not impossible, but it’s hard.”
Murray, who worked for Brown in a 2005 City Council race, is unaffiliated in this contest.
Parker Campaign Manager Adam Harris insisted she will have enough money to continue running a robust campaign effort that will include television advertising through election day, Nov. 3.
“We are right on target with what our plan has been the entire campaign,” he said. “I feel very good about where we are with fundraising now.”
Harris noted that their numbers are artificially low because the $738,000 of expenditures listed in the report include $500,000 for advertising, not all of which has been spent. But rival campaigns tracking the ad expenses using publicly available information said that as of Oct. 12, Parker will have spent $405,000, leaving little remaining after the advertising production costs.
No one will ever admit they missed their fundraising target, so make of this what you will. I have heard of an internal poll taken by the Locke campaign about two weeks ago that showed Parker in the lead, so her position is still fairly strong. I also expect there to be a lot of money raised and spent during the runoff. The main question at this point is whether Locke and Brown’s financial advantages today can enable them to make up ground with the still sizable number of undecided voters.
Political consultant Marc Campos noted that Locke only began introducing himself to voters through TV ads on Monday and his campaign report showed little to nothing in expenditures for direct mail or radio advertising.
“It should be good news for Gene Locke and his supporters, but today is the first day voters in general get to see who he is,” said Campos, who is unaffiliated in the race. “They can beat on their chest all they want, but they’re still in uncharted waters.”
Say it with me now: More poll numbers would be nice to have. Until then, we’re all just guessing.
I’ve added more totals to my Google spreadsheet since I published last night, as new reports have continued to appear. Despite what it says in the sidebar of this story, Roy Morales has in fact filed his report. He raised $23K, which is actually better than he did in the first six months, and has about $4600 on hand. In other words, he’s still a footnote. Outside of the Mayor and Controller races, most incumbent Council members who have opponents are in good shape. Sue Lovell has $165K on hand, while her opponents have less than $10K combined. Jolanda Jones was actually outraised by Davetta Daniels, $19K to $7K, but Jones has $50K on hand; I guesstimated Daniels’ COH total at about $14K because she didn’t give totals, so I added up her expenditures and subtracted from the contributions (which I also added up myself). Anne Clutterbuck has $149K and Mike Sullivan has $103K; Sullivan’s opponent Phillip Garrison raised a quite respectable $30K but has only $16K on hand. I can’t quite judge the state of the races in B and D, as Jarvis Johnson (raised $15K, has $41K on hand) and Wanda Adams (raised $16K, has $29K on hand) raised modest amounts but none of their opponents (Roger Bowden in B, Otis Jordan and Larry McKinzie in D, all of whom announced after the July reporting deadline) have visible reports.
Among open office contenders, C.O. Bradford in At Large #4 had the strongest period, bringing in $113K with $41K on hand; Noel Freeman had $21K and $11K. Stephen Costello in At Large #1 and Oliver Pennington in District G did well again, with $79K and $72K, respectively. Karen Derr raised $47K, which was more than any other contender and more than all incumbents other than Lovell, but she reported only $9475 on hand. Costello ($119K) and Pennington ($102K) dominate that number, as they are the only ones with over $100K on hand; Bradford, George Foulard in G ($29K raised, $47K on hand), and Mike Laster in F ($18K raised, $29K on hand) are the runnersup. I should note that I do not see reports yet for Mills Worsham in G or for several contenders in F, so this may get revised later.
Finally, on a side note, I had said previously that only a couple of Council candidates had been putting out campaign videos. I overlooked Noel Freeman, whose YouTube channel has multiple vids. If I’ve missed any other examples, please let me know.
UPDATE: What I’ve done so far is just look at the totals. Martha has started digging into the detailed reports, and she found that while Bradford did raise a decent amount of cash, more than 60% of what he took in was in-kind donations, including some that appear to have exceeded the individual contribution limits. Take a look and see what she reports, and also look at her closer peek at Roy Morales’ report as well.
UPDATE: It has been pointed out to me that Phillip Garrison, the challenger in District E, reported all of his contributions received since the beginning of the year in his total, instead of just the amount raised between July 1 and September 24. I went through the individual contributions, and $24,190 of it was raised on or before June 30, meaning his actual amount raised (cash and in-kind) for the reporting period was $6,135. Also by my calculation, he’s spent $11,603.90 since July 1, which is consistent with his July report, so I believe his cash on hand amount is accurate.
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