Funds hard to come by, Kortz is paying his own way

In his underdog campaign for Senate, state Representative Bill Kortz (D-Allegheny) has one big contributor: himself.

With money tough to scrounge up in a primary dominated by Arlen Specter and Joe Sestak, Kortz has been largely self-funding a bare-bones campaign—paying for travel expenses without reimbursements and loaning the campaign money while raising minimal amounts from local party committees in his district.

All in all, the campaign has raised only $4,400 throughout the election cycle, finishing…

Today is campaign finance day, and you can help!

Good morning, political junkies. It’s that time of year again, federal campaign finance day, when any remaining FEC reports are supposed to be published online. As I’ve pI want to do things a little different this time. When July quarterly reports were filed, I was too heavily focused on just pumping out numbers from candidates across the state. This time, we’ve managed to get many of the less detailed—and less important—numbers out well before the 15th. So instead, we’re going to focus on really looking deep into these reports, for any tib bits of interesting data. Remember, we cover politics at the micro level here, so almost anything is newsworthy. An interesting donor? An intriguing expenditure? Something that doesn’t add up? Make your voice heard and shape the coverage, by a href="mailto: dan@pa2010.com" target="_blank"e-mailing/a or posting a comment here or elsewhere./p
pNow, on to the nitty gritty. We want to focus our attention most heavily on the Senate race, and the most competitive House races, such as the 6th District, the 7th and the 15th (reports for the governor’s race come another day)./p
pHere’s how you can help (caveat: many of these reports aren’t online as of this being written, but they will be, so keep looking). Look for Arlen Specter’s October quarterly campaign finance report a href="http://query.nictusa.com/cgi-bin/fecimg/?C00280206" onclick="javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackEvent','outbound-article','http://query.nictusa.com']);return TrackClick("http%3A%2F%2Fquery.nictusa.com%2Fcgi-bin%2Ffecimg%2F%3FC00280206','here')" target="_blank"here/a. Look for Joe Sestak’s October quarterly a href="http://query.nictusa.com/cgi-bin/fecimg/?C00465492" onclick="javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackEvent','outbound-article','http://query.nictusa.com']);return TrackClick("http%3A%2F%2Fquery.nictusa.com%2Fcgi-bin%2Ffecimg%2F%3FC00465492','here')" target="_blank">here, Pat Toomey’s here.

Searching for the House reports takes a couple more steps. Visit

The First Read — October 15, 2009

Every Monday-Thursday morning, pa2010.com compiles the most important political news of the day, from newspapers to the blogosphere and back. Enjoy this edition.

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Specter has $8.7M
Senator Arlen Specter continues to raise money in bunches ahead of next year’s reelection fight, with his campaign saying Wednesday that it had raised $1.8 million…

THE PRESS ROOM: Sestak’s latest PR tease, anonymous quote included, is quickly deflated

An occasional series of articles exploring how political campaigns are playing out in the media—in print, on the air, online and behind the scenes.

Even by the standards of Joe Sestak’s recent media-teasing, what the campaign tried to pull off Wednesday showed chutzpah. Late in the afternoon, the campaign e-mailed reporters boasting of a “special announcement” in which a “former Democratic challenger” would endorse the Senate hopeful.

“One of the few Democratic candidates…

Report: Another GOP candidate in the picture for guv race

The Republican primary for governor may soon get another candidate.

The Post-Gazette

Kanjorski raised another $237K

With a primary challenge looming, Congressman Paul Kanjorski (D-11) is well on his way to building up a formidable war chest for next year’s reelection bid.

Kanjorski raised more than $237,000 during the third quarter, finishing the period with about $808,000 in cash on hand, according to

Rasmussen: Toomey tops Specter by 5, but even with Sestak

Congressman Joe Sestak (D-7) has another piece of ammunition in his argument that he’s the better candidate to take on Republican Pat Toomey next year.

A Rasmussen poll released Wednesday showed Sestak in a dead heat with Toomey, leading by a statistically insignificant one percent. But Senator Arlen Specter trailed Toomey by five points in the same survey.

Full Story

Specter has $8.7M on hand

Senator Arlen Specter continues to raise money in bunches ahead of next year’s reelection fight, with his campaign saying Wednesday that it had raised $1.8 million dollars during the third quarter, finishing with a whopping $8.7 million in cash on hand.

Complete campaign finance reports won’t be published online until Thursday, but the campaign provided a copy of the summary sheet it had filed with the FEC, which shows that Specter has raised almost $12…

Joe Sestak Urges Congress to Extend First-time Home Buyers Tax Credit

By SESTAK FOR SENATE

MEDIA, PA – Following his introduction of the First-time Homebuyer Credit Continuation Act, Democratic U.S. Senate candidate, Congressman Joe Sestak held a news conference today in Philadelphia to call on Congress to turn this legislation into law.  Joe helped pass the legislation as part of the Economic Stimulus bill, which has already helped more than one million people purchase a new home, but is set to expire at the end of…

A mish-mash of campaign finance data

Tomorrow is the big campaign finance day, and we’re going to be handling it a little bit differently than we did last quarter. More on that later.

In the meantime, here’s a collection of campaign finance data that’s already been published online. It comes from races across the state, mostly the less competitive ones that we haven’t been covering as closely.

Stay tuned for more info about the big stuff. But for now, enjoy this.…