NY-22: New York’s 22nd Congressional District has attracted more outside spending through Sunday from the "Big Four" House groups (the DCCC, House Majority PAC, NRCC, and Congressional Leadership Fund) than any other House race in the nation, but that’s not entirely because of how competitive it is. The New York Times reports that Republican Claudia Tenney has been so badly outraised by freshman Democratic Rep. Anthony Brindisi that CLF has needed to step in and handle many of the basic functions that her campaign should be doing instead.
Tenney, who won this seat in 2016, was narrowly unseated by Brindisi in 2018 after a very expensive contest where she was decisively outspent. This time, the financial gap is even wider: Brindisi raised a grand total of $5.5 million through Oct. 14 compared to the $2.1 million that Tenney brought in, and he’s been able to run a strong campaign. The same cannot be said of his rival.
The Times writes that Tenney is one of several Republican candidates for whom CLF has “been forced to step in to carry out campaign fundamentals like advertising and phone calls, as well as get-out-the-vote programs.” But unlike those other Republican contenders, who go unnamed in the article, there were already plenty of signs that Tenney was a bad candidate—yet national Republicans consolidated behind her well before the primary anyway.
Oh, that’s not all. The paper also says that Tenney is also one of the Republican House candidates who has “run almost no ads themselves, leaving the super PAC to carry their entire television campaign.”
Indeed, CLF has spent a total of $6.2 million through Sunday, which is about $490,000 more than its dropped in any other contest in the nation. (The situation is similar in the seat that’s received the second-most CLF spending, Texas’ 22nd District, as Republican nominee Troy Nehls is so cash starved that he had to stop airing broadcast TV ads this month.) Their allies at the NRCC, meanwhile, have spent $2.8 million, which is the committee’s seventh-largest expenditure nationwide.
This upstate New York seat, which includes Binghamton, Rome, and Utica, backed Donald Trump 55-39 four years ago, so it’s possible that even a weak candidate like Tenney could beat Brindisi with help from the top of the ticket. However, the one poll we’ve seen from this entire contest, an early October survey from Siena, showed Brindisi up 48-39 as Joe Biden led 45-44. National Democrats are still spending plenty of money, though, with the DCCC and HMP dropping a total of $4.4 million through Sunday, so no one is acting like this contest is anywhere close to over.