Campaign finance

Yesterday was the "cutoff" for Q3 fundraising. Bill Richardson seemed to have gotten quite a few headlines for having raised $5,000,000. Barack and Hillary reportedly raised $20,000,000 each in Q3. I understand Mitt raised $10,000,000 and added another $7,000,000 from his own personal fortune... I'm not sure about anyone else, although Ron Paul raised $1,200,000 online in the past week alone.

Chris Murphy had raised $780,000 through Q2 of this year, but his fundraising may start to go dry now... among all incoming freshman in the 110th Congress, Chris received the most money from MoveOn.org last year. Then last week he tattooed MoveOn for their "General Betray Us" ad... so many MoveOn supporters are fuming right now. Chris' likely GOP opponent, state Senator David Cappiello, had raised over $200,000 through Q2... regardless, no word yet on the fundraising for either of them.

Perhaps more interesting to many of you though will be the local fundraising reports that had their "cutoff" yesterday. For me personally, I'm not yet sure if I need to report anything. The reason for that is my intention... I intend to spend less than $1,000. So I may not need to file any reports. For anyone spending more than a grand though, they'll need to file. And I expect most people will be spending more than a thousand bucks.

Why spend more $1,000? Easy... with 9,000 or so households in Cheshire... a postcard to every house in town could easily cost $3,000 (cardstock / postage / photocopying)... for a district, call it $750. A lawn sign costs about $8. And I think there are about 400 streets in town. So to have a lawn sign on 1 of every 4 streets would cost $800... and on and on. You can exceed $1,000 very easily.

Anyway... I imagine the press will be looking at those local campaign finance reports when they get filed with the Town Clerk, Carolyn Soltis, in the next week to ten days. So maybe there will be some reporting on them... or... perhaps you'd like to do your own reporting! If not here, then write your own post at Cheshire Town Post. I'd be happy to give you a blogging tutorial... and I imagine (if he has the time) Craig Houghton would also be happy to help with the endeavor.

Tim White