An article yesterday in The New Maine Times Playing a Campaign by the Numbers, examines the fundraising reports from last quarter with a different perspective.
But it’s interesting how much campaign finance reports tell about the health of a campaign.
Here’s an interesting number. Barely more than 10 percent of Americans have ever given a dime to a candidate running for office.
Political conventional wisdom says that for every donor who gives to a campaign, there are 90 voters for the candidate who don’t donate.
So money is a way we can look at a snapshot of the polls, even if there isn’t a poll going on at the moment.
Looking at the candidate filings in Maine, this reporter extrapolated numbers for both the Senate and the Gubernatorial races.
Bellows also has a larger number of small donors - 1,135 gave an average of $50, for a total of 1,636 donors that are not either the candidate or PACs.
So if we apply conventional political wisdom to the fourth quarter, Collins has a bit of a problem. Her fundraising has fallen off a cliff. She is getting no funding from the national party. And her opponent {Bellows} has garnered 1,636 donors to Collins’ 217. If conventional wisdom is right, that means that the challenger {Bellows} has 147,240 voters waiting in the wings, while Collins has only 19,530.
And in the race to oust the embarrassment of Paul LePage:
...conventional political wisdom suggests that Michaud has more supporters ready to come out of the woodwork than do either Cutler or LePage. Using the conventional wisdom rule, Cutler is currently commanding about 68,000 votes; LePage can count on 72,000 votes, and Michaud, nearly 290,000 votes. So far.
Maine is a small state with under a million voters. It looks like the Dems are off to a good start.