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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 written before, campaign finance days are a great time for us to team up and work together in digging through hundreds of lines of names and numbers.

I 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 e-mailing or posting a comment here or elsewhere.

Now, 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).

Here’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 here. Look for Joe Sestak’s October quarterly here, Pat Toomey’s here, Bill Kortz’s here, and Peg Luksik’s here.

Searching for the House reports takes a couple more steps. Visit this search site. Under the “State” menu click on Pennsylvania, under the “Committee Type” menu click “House” and under the “Report Type” drop-down menu select “OCT QUARTERLY.” Hit the search button, and you’ll get all the October quarterly reports for Pennsylvania House candidates, past and present.

OK, now I know this has been a lot, so here’s a few questions to guide your sleuthing.

1. Pat Toomey disclosed his money raised but not his cash on hand. Has he been spending heavily? Where’s the money going?

2. Is Joe Sestak’s fundraising speeding up or leveling off? Who’s still giving? What’s he spending on?

3. How did Pat Meehan raise so much so fast in the 7th District?

4. Who’s giving to John Callahan in the 15th District?

Thanks for your help, political junkies. Let’s make it a great campaign finance day.

UPDATE: I belatedly remembered that Senate reports typically aren’t published in full for a couple weeks. So we’ll revisit some of these questions at that time.

share001btn Today is campaign finance day, and you can help!

October 15, 2009 at 8:00 am

--Dan Hirschhorn

comments

comments [9] | post a comment

  1. David Diano

    Oct 14th, 2009

    I think I can find some time to look into #2. :-)

  2. Pizza!

    Oct 15th, 2009

    Welch made a $24 in-kind for pizza. Good stuff.

  3. Domino's

    Oct 15th, 2009

    I see less than 10% of Welch’s money came from OPM

    (to use the preffered term of the First Senate District)

  4. ChescoTom

    Oct 15th, 2009

    So almost $14,000 of Curt’s money came from state PACs, including large healthcare providers. Does he have a history with those players? I suppose I should not be suyrprised as he sits on the Insurance committee in the state legislature. So he is getting contributions from companies that his committee is responsible for overseeing? I get it now.

  5. David Diano

    Oct 15th, 2009

    BTW, does anybody know why the Senate version is image files, but the House filings have been electronic data files you can download, import to Excel, etc. ?

  6. Dan Hirschhorn

    Oct 15th, 2009

    Hey David,

    I’ve been trying to figure that out myself. There are pdf versions you can download for Senate, but the plug-ins usually don’t work.

    I’ll get back to you.

    Dan Hirschhorn

  7. David Diano

    Oct 16th, 2009

    Sestak still filed his congressional numbers:

    http://query.nictusa.com/cgi-bin/dcdev/forms/C00419291/436581/

    This has Sestak’s stuff for July/August.

    Note: His brother got a pay cut to $3325/month

    He’s got 3 staffers making about $1500/month

    His two sisters are still making $3000/month each

    No obvious campaign manager.

    Cash on hand: $4,232,899 (no transfer to senate campaign indicated)
    Contributions: $35,589
    Other Receipts: $12,761
    ————————–
    Total Receipts: $48,350

    Expenses: $82,461

    Payroll total: $29,770
    Payroll portion to siblings: $18,862
    (that’s 63% of payroll)

    Those volunteers are total suckers. Sestak should give them at least minimum wage.

    Is he keeping the other $500,000 of his $4.7 million on hand in a separate Senate account?

    Seriously, Sestak volunteers….
    Take a break from your unappreciated labors and spend the next two weeks helping county candidates and your local commissioner, school board and tax collector candidates.
    Sestak doesn’t care about them, because he doesn’t actually live in Delaware county. But you volunteers DO. Take some pride in your local Democratic party.
    Just because Sestak wasted 3 years and didn’t do squat to build up the party in his district, doesn’t mean you have to.
    THINK!! How much time do Sestak and his siblings spend worrying about the 2009 local candidates? Is Joe asking volunteers go to the polls with those stupid Sestak handouts? or even to have them in a pile at the polling places?

    Go to http://www.delcodems.com/

    Volunteer to help your party in the 2009 elections. IF after working for appreciative candidates you want to go back to Sestak, that’s fine. But for now, THINK what is more effective for Democrats and DO the right thing.

  8. helpful

    Oct 16th, 2009

    The reason that the House candidates have easier files to use is that campaigns can submit them electronically. The Senate requires paper copies. So the versions online in the House came from online data, and the Senate ones had to be scanned in.

  9. David Diano

    Oct 16th, 2009

    Helpful-
    If that’s true, it’s the dumbest f*kcing thing for the FEC. I’m pretty sure even the Presidential had electronic download.

    I thought that maybe they got the electronic data and artificially generated populate templates.

    That needs to be fixed.

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