I'd like to take a quick focus on two elections that are vastly important this year in both holding the line in the Senate and getting the gavel back into Pelosi's hands. That is the Indiana Senate race between Joe Donnelly and Richard Mourdock and the IN-2 District race between Brendan Mullen and Jackie Walorski.
These two races need some further scrutiny on here so below the fold we'll look at each candidate, the state of the current races and where we go from here.
I'm not going to rehash the Senate race in entirety, if you haven't caught it yet then you need to read this breakdown by poopdogcomedy.
Instead of chewing through it again I'll just lay out the state of the race in money terms and why in reality this is closer than any pundit or paper might portray it.
Right now the race is in a dead heat, however we are facing issues ahead of us. With the recent implosion of Mittens we may see third party groups like Club for Growth start to shift their funding from anti Obama to putting that money into these down ticket races.
Donnelly is sitting well on 1.3m at the moment and has spent almost as much, much of this in the form of targeted ad buys in key counties. There is also the possibility of opening up new offices to work from, like the office here locally in South Bend IN.
Mourdock on the other hand. Has raised a significant sum in the war chest. Total he has raised so far around 4m dollars. However here is the key thing, he has spent most of it. So far to date he has spent a little over 3m dollars and has a little less than 900k dollars left.
This is where the third party groups come in as we have seen groups like Club for Growth literally drop 800k in the last two weeks here.
Analyzing the break down of contributions of Donnelly we see he literally has a very minimal personal contribution compared to Mourdock who raised a significant personal contribution sum of 300k compared to Mourdock of over 1m.
We need to fix this, despite Mourdock spending a HUGE sum of his warchest he still finds himself tied with Donnelly in all polls but Rasmussen, and we know how reliable those are. So please, lets help Indiana turn a close shade to blue and kick in a few bucks to help Donnelly combat groups like Club for Growth.
Winning here in Indiana will help ensure we hold the Senate as this is a race that up until Lugar lost in the primary was all but assured a GOP hold.
Now on to IN-2
This faces Brendan Mullen against Jackie Walorski, and in this section I'll break the campaign down a little more.
Brendan Mullen is a South Bend native and an Iraqi War vet, he's also a business owner and maintains a successful business which goes out of its way to employ veterans when possible. He is running his campaign in a totally no low blow manner and his only what you could consider negative ads are only calling out his opponent for her lack of service when she was in the state senate.
He is a blue dog, almost exactly in the same vein as Joe. He is pro business, anti-abortion, but is he also pro protectionist (read tariffs to protect American jobs) and pro labor. Most importantly he is not a republican.
I've met Mullen, he's a sane person. Even myself being a progressive when talking to him he was always respectful of my viewpoints. He even recognized some key differences between my view points and his view points but ultimately he recognized that compromise and consensus can be reached between two opposing positions to find the best possible solution. And really let me stress this again, he is pro labor and most importantly a Democrat.
His warchest?
So far he has raised around 800k dollars and has spent close to 230k dollars leaving him at the moment around close to 575k left in the warchest. Most of his contributions come from PAC and large contributors. This is because as a native of South Bend and a business owner here, he is directly plugged into the old democratic machine of IN-2. But the old Dem Machine here isn't running as well as it used to. With recent state redistricting, IN-2 lost a lot of trending blue counties and gained a large number of solid red counties. In short this is going to be a tough fight.
Jackie Walorski comes from the state senate, where she missed a large portion of her committee assignments early on in her career. She is a direct partisan and was literally a road block in the committees when she actually decided to show up. In short she is the worst sort of politician and just a bad choice for Indiana. She lost to Donnelly in 2010 by only 1 point. This very close margin is important to note because now due to redistricting, the fight is going to be even harder.
Did I mention that she recently smeared Mullen regarding his Veterans service and business operations?
Her warchest?
It beats Mullen. She has raised a total of 1.1m but has only spent close to 420k leaving her around 724k left. 200+ thousand may not seem like a lot, but in a house race that is A LOT of money. Nearly two thirds of the dollars for Warlorski come from large donors, almost more than likely from business connections through Chocola and his Club for Growth pals. Both have close to the individual donor contributions in at around 100k dollars but when looking at the third party money....it ain't here.
Yet...
Again with the implosion of Mittens today, we may see this change. Third parties may start to shuffle money into down ticket races, especially races like the Senate and IN-2 where the races are close, and that may shift the races towards red, and prevent us from our goal of getting that Gavel where it belongs.
So lets kick a few bucks towards Mullen and help IN-2 stay blue.
If you're a Hoosier, especially one in IN-2 and are wanting to start organizing together there are smallish micro groups talking of organizing. If the interest is here, lets get a group together and start really organizing to turn this state at the very least, purple.
Remember, we gave this state to Obama in 2008 and kept Donnelly in office despite that red wave in 2010.
We can do it again, the work is ahead of us we only need to pick up our tools and work.