| There have been lots of fundraising numbers flying around in the past couple of weeks as gubernatorial candidates look to spin their prowess on the donor circuit into positive press and grassroots support. But can we compare their numbers on an apples-to-apples basis?
Sure. Here's how (and a big thanks goes to Robin Marty for helping me assemble these numbers).
This might be a little difficult to read, so let's break it down: the columns you'll want to watch closely are all the way to the right, in Dollars Per Month and Dollars Per Donor.
The idea here is that candidates started raising money at different times from different people, so we want to get an idea of how quickly they're raising it and from whom -- a higher Dollars Per Donor figure means the candidate is hitting up fewer donors for higher amounts, and a lower figure means the campaign can go back to those same donors repeatedly for more donations.
Dollars Per Month can tell us how quickly a candidate taps out their fundraising "base" -- if the candidate has only been in the race for a few months but has raised a bunch of money, there's a decent chance this rate will fall off quickly as they get into tougher-to-get dollars. The same thing happened to Paul Thissen after he pulled in "low-hanging fruit" in 2008.
So with Margaret Anderson Kelliher, Matt Entenza, and Paul Thissen all bunched up around $182-$184 per donor, we don't know a whole lot about their takes other than that MAK has raised money faster than the other two (by virtue of being an official candidate for less time than the others. Steve Kelley -- whose totals here are accurate, as confirmed by his campaign this week, btw -- has a lower dollars-per-donor figure, so on average he can hit those same donors up for more money this year than the others can. Ditto Tom Rukavina.
On the GOP side, it's tough to do any kind of comparison, since at last check we still don't know how many individual donors Tom Emmer had in 2009.
Update: R.T. Rybak just reported a total fundraising take of $278,000 since November of last year -- breaking down the numbers as accurately as possible leaves Rybak with $92,667/month for his gubernatorial committee, and a dollars-per-donor figure of $200. Rybak is in a unique position in that he spent all of last year campaigning for reelection, so he had a custom-build fundraising call list waiting for him last November. Rybak reported having $25,000 cash-on-hand at the end of 2009 -- but a big fundraising push at the beginning of this year as well. His fundraising came from a total of 691 donors.
Metro-vs-Greater Minnesota comparisons would be quite interesting for Rybak. |
