Freaked out at the possibility of Darcy Burner winning her seat, a whole host of unsavory characters have suddenly piled on:
- Third party groups are dumping hundreds of thousands into the district.
- Reichert's media buyer has given the candidate an illegal $500,000 loan to saturate the airwaves with anti-Burner attack ads.
- The Seattle Times gleefully ran a bullshit story about Darcy lying about her Harvard degree. The paper has now been forced to backpedal furiously. Now watch the paper ignore Reichert's own lies about his college degree.
- Washington Monthly alum Amy Sullivan wrote in Time how us dastardly bloggers were sinking Burner's chances.
- Republicans claim, and the local media parrots, charges that Burner is funded by out-of-state liberal wackos (that's us), when Reichert gets even more of his money from out of state. And his doesn't come from small-dollar donors, but corporate interests and lobbyists.
- While the NRCC is pulling back from most of its targeted races, this is one of the very few in which they remain fully engaged.
Yet throughout it all, Darcy has taken a small lead in the race.
Look, here's the deal: The local media and the local political establishment see themselves as kingmakers. They get to decide who sinks or swims in their areas of influence. Then along comes Darcy Burner, thinking she can crash the gates and get elected for office in the district, and the local elites are pissed. So they conspire with Reichert, a supposed local hero, to dish all sorts of crap about Darcy and bury Reichert's dirt.
We're winning this race, but they're throwing EVERYTHING plus the kitchen sink at Darcy. If we want to win this thing, we've got to get her back and push back. We've got to leave everything on the road.
Right now Darcy is about $350,000 behind Reichert. I'm not going to pretend that we can raise that kind of money quickly, but can we cover $50,000 of that? Can we help Burner fight against the smears from the state and national GOP?
I've given Darcy $1,000 already. I'll match the next $1,300 pledged to Darcy in the comment threads and max myself out. My wife will kill me, but like I said, we've got to leave everything on the road. Join me, and let's fight the local media elites, the local Republicans, the national Republicans, the vicious third-party groups that have their sights set on taking Darcy down.
Give to Darcy so she can fight back. And if you live anywhere near her district (and I know that's a lot of you), please volunteer.
We're starting this fundraiser with Darcy at $200,000 on our O2B page. Let's get her to $250,000.
Update: We're at almost $10,000 in 30 minutes. Nice!