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Doherty – Donoghue finances compared
Yesterday was the deadline for legislative candidates to file the pre-primary report with the state Office of Campaign and Political Finance. Covering the period from January 1, 2010 to August 27, 2010, these reports show all incoming contributions and all outgoing expenditures. Eileen Donoghue’s was filed early enough in the evening to allow me to write a post last night but Doherty’s didn’t appear until sometime after 10 pm. Rather than doing a separate post for him now, I thought it would be more helpful to compare the data from the two candidates:
Contributions received:
Doherty – $135,354
Donoghue – $98,217 (plus $2047 on hand from city council campaigns)
Number of donors
NOTE: Doherty listed all donors regardless of amount while Donoghue aggregated smaller donations and listed only those contributing more than $50. Thus, she had more donors than my number, but I have no way of knowing how many although they were all small dollar amounts.
Doherty – 669
Donoghue – 430
Average donation
Doherty – $202
Donoghue – $214
Percentage of donors from within the district
Doherty – 28%
Donoghue – 53%
Number of donors making maximum $500 contribution
Doherty – 158
Donoghue – 78
Total Expenditures
Doherty – $90,198
Donoghue – $73,190
Amount spent on mailing (printing, design, postage)
Doherty – $51,121
Donoghue – $22,207
Amount spent on consultants
Doherty – $22,582
Donoghue – $9750
Amount spent on paid staff
Doherty – $3575
Donoghue – $26,206
Amount spent on Lowell Sun
Doherty – 0
Donoghue – $650
Amount of money on hand as of August 27
Doherty – $45,155
Donoghue – $27,075
72 and 158 were the key numbers for me.
72% of Candidate Doherty’s donors were from outside the district. This compares to 47% for Candidate Donoghue.
Further, Mr Doherty had 158 donors making the maximum $500 contribution. This compares to 78 for Ms Donoghue.
While there is insufficient data to really understand the distribution of donors and funds, on the surface it would appear that Mr Doherty has lots of small donations, which one might think of as more likely to come from within the district. And the larger contributions would be from outside the district.
That makes one wonder just whose strings are being pulled, but them I am a Republican and didn’t get the latest mailed memo and can just go on what I read in the blogs. :-)
Regards — Cliff
What I wanna know is, why don’t YOU get the drive by comments? LOL
Great job Dick…thanks for providing this.
Three months ago would anyone have ever believe that Doherty would out spend/raise Donoghue in this race?
Great recap Dick, just curious, I just signed in and reviewed the OCPF report and notice that what you categorize as “Paid Staff” is reported as “Independent Contractor” – are the three individuals identified in the Expenditure report actual staff members of Eileen’s?
I am willing to bet that that the out of district donations are mostly from the 5th Congressional district.
Leon – both Doherty and Donoghue paid college-age individuals to work on the campaigns. Since they’re local, I know the folks in question in other contexts and have seen them at campaign events. Until I saw the campaign finance report, I assumed they were campaign volunteers but the report makes clear that they were paid stipends by the campaigns. In this post, I grouped those expenditures in the “paid staff” category. When both candidates listed payments to individuals who they labeled “consultants”, I treated those payments as a separate category, assuming a consultant is a more high level strategic asset rather than a day-to-day campaign operative.
I am surprised you failed to make a point of the total money spent by either campaign on both consultants and paid staff. The Donoghue camapign has spent about 10.000 dollars more on the compined total. A lot of money for what many people feel has been a lackluster campaign.
In this post, I omitted my analysis and just presented the numbers, hoping that readers might share their observations in comments. Before the election, I plan to do another post with my observations of this campaign. The amount spent on staff and consultants by both campaigns certainly stood out and will undoubtedly be part of that post.