Should have done this a long time ago, just to close the books on the 2020 election cycle, but for a variety of reasons I didn’t. With the forthcoming special election in CD06, I now have a reason to care about the April finance reports for Congress, so I may as well cross this off the list. The October 2020 finance reports can be found here, and you can get the links to all the earlier posts from there.
MJ Hegar – Senate
Lizzie Fletcher – CD07
Colin Allred – CD32
Hank Gilbert – CD01
Sima Ladjevardian – CD02
Lulu Seikaly – CD03
Stephen Daniel – CD06
Elizabeth Hernandez – CD08
Mike Siegel – CD10
Adrienne Bell – CD14
Rick Kennedy – CD17
Wendy Davis – CD21
Sri Kulkarni – CD22
Gina Ortiz Jones – CD23
Candace Valenzuela – CD24
Julie Oliver – CD25
Carol Ianuzzi – CD26
Donna Imam – CD31
Dist Name Raised Spent Loans On Hand
============================================================
Sen Hegar 29,597,569 29,558,486 0 86,564
07 Fletcher 6,405,639 6,386,609 0 61,096
32 Allred 5,777,600 5,721,622 0 159,422
01 Gilbert 968,154 734,410 50,000 233,744
02 Ladjevardian 3,894,082 3,886,672 50,000 7,410
03 Seikaly 1,654,380 1,654,038 3,000 341
06 Daniel 681,820 678,976 0 2,833
08 Hernandez 17,407 15,160 0 1,985
10 Siegel 2,942,987 2,898,827 127,835 47,651
14 Bell 248,995 245,174 0 8,920
17 Kennedy 216,825 218,253 0 0
21 Davis 10,428,476 10,366,864 257,967 61,611
22 Kulkarni 5,781,704 5,772,741 0 36,731
23 Jones 6,918,062 7,005,280 0 4,300
24 Valenzuela 4,945,025 4,933,058 0 11,967
25 Oliver 2,228,218 2,214,190 2,644 14,027
26 Ianuzzi 121,500 121,500 44,361 0
31 Imam 1,242,218 1,242,218 0 0
I’m not going to spend too much time on this since all these races are over and we know what happened, but a few observations:
– I don’t know what Hank Gilbert has planned for that $233K he has left over, but I hope he intends to do something with it. We’re going to need some dough in a lot of races next year.
– I’d like to see an autopsy done on how all this money was spent. It was a weird year, and a lot of money that would have been spent on field wound up going to other uses, so maybe it will be hard to draw meaningful conclusions, but still. I have no doubt that some candidates spent their money better than others, and that some candidates had much higher overhead costs than others. We should get a better picture of what happened here.
– I say that because I think the 2020s are much more likely to have multiple competitive races throughout the decade, in a way that we didn’t in the 2010s. If so, we’re going to see a much higher baseline of campaign contributions overall than what we were used to. So again, let’s have some confidence that our candidates and their campaigns are spending it well.
– MJ Hegar got off to a slower start than Beto did in raising money for her Senate campaign, but almost $30 million is real money, enough to run a credible statewide race. We’re going to need that kind of money for at least a couple of our statewide candidates next year.
– The 2022 Congressional campaign is going to be much more compressed than the last few have been, since we won’t know until this fall what the districts look like, and that’s without taking any litigation into account. Who even knows when we’ll begin to see potential candidates make themselves known?
That’s about all I have. I’ll check the Q1 2021 reports to see who’s raised what for the May 1 CD06 special, and we’ll see what if anything is interesting after that.