There are, without a doubt, some of you out there who fit this description: your mailbox (snail mail here) is 50% entreaties for money, 40% junk mail, and 10% bills. Your inbox for your e-mail, especially right now, is inundated with requests for campaign cash from candidates from coast to coast, to say nothing of the national committees.
Your mailbox is full because you have been very generous with your money (or, as one of my friends put it so politely, you are on the "sucker list").
Your email inbox is filled to the brim because the deadline for the second quarter's FEC reports is rapidly approaching, ending tomorrow evening.
If you are serious about a particular candidate, or you are serious about maintaining or building a Democratic majority, it is a day that matters.
Q2 of the off-year matters because of the timing involved. This is early in the campaign cycle, but it is also just about the time that key decisions get made. The summer of the off-year is when a lot of challengers decide whether to poop or get off the pot. It is also when a lot of incumbents make the call on whether to hang them up, or stick it out for another term.
The dollar amounts emanating from campaigns in about two weeks (campaigns have to file their July Quarterly reports with the FEC by July 15th) are critical to this decision making calculus. To put it another way, what donors (like many of the folks on this site) can do in the next two days can impact what happens in November of 2010. A strong FEC report from that first-time challenger might convince an incumbent to stand down, or it might convince a national committee that THIS is a race that they should be involved in.
Conversely, a strong report from that freshman incumbent you worked so hard to help elect last year might take the wind out of the sails of potential challengers, whose political ambition might be cooled by the suddenly rising financial wall that they have to climb.
So, yeah...it matters.
Let's dispense with a few objections that are pretty easy to see coming. In any piece here on Daily Kos that has ever been written about campaign cash, there have been an inevitable 20 or 30 comments about how the quality of the CANDIDATE should matter more than their capacity for raising money. Therefore, any commentary on the need to raise campaign money was somehow spitting in the face of democracy.
A noble sentiment, but not a terribly realistic one.
Until there is public campaign finance (something that, if it could pass constitutional muster, is an intriguing concept), those FEC reports are a critical way that national committees, the press, and the candidates keep score. Maybe we'd like it NOT to be that way, but what is...is. Therefore, if the goal is to elect more and better Democrats, until the system changes, those that can afford to do so are going to need to put their money where their mouths are. It's just that simple.
The other objection, on the other hand, is entirely an individual decision, and not one that is easily countered.
That is the "the Democrats won't get another dollar from me until they (fill in blank of desperately needed action)" crowd. A crowd that proved pretty irresistable late last year when Joe Lieberman was welcomed back into the Senate fold with a big hug and a cookie.
The sentiment is hard not to understand and appreciate. This would probably be a pretty good spot to remind you that the Republican Party probably cares less about said issue than the Democrats do, but that might be little, if any comfort. So, those of you seeking a campaign finance Conscientious Objector status, consider it granted.
Those with the motivation and the means, on the other hand, might be well served to find the campaign you care about, and show them some love before tomorrow night. Actblue isn't a bad place to start, and the campaign you care about probably has a page there. Beyond that, this is a pretty big set of tubes, and undoubtedly the campaign of your choice has a site with a donate function as well, as do the three Democratic committees (DNC,DSCC,DCCC).