The FEC publishes a list of South Dakota's 30 biggest suckers—i.e., folks willing to hand itemized contributions to Annette Bosworth to run for U.S. Senate. Bosworth's third-quarter campaign finance filing provides the following information:
- The Bosworth campaign says it has $28,722.16 in cash on hand.
- In typical Bosworth-Haber financing style, the campaign already is in debt $37,065.97.
- Team Bosworth claims total Q3 contributions of $50,229.06.
- Annette Bosworth contributed a quarter of that amount, $12,426.92, in the form of in-kind contributions of office rent, mileage, and use of a ConsumerBase mailing list. This expenditure comes from a mom who supposedly was so broke she had to move her kids into an RV in the middle of winter.
Now when I read the news that Bosworth had outraised Rep. Stace Nelson by $6,500, I was ready to ream Team Nelson for letting a flim-flam woman with no ideological moorings out-fundraise them. I don't care if Bosworth had an extra month: that a candidate with no coherent policy positions, network, or organizing skills raise more campaign contributions than you in any amount of time is an embarrassment that should have Stace and Aaron and Ken losing sleep.
But go read the FEC Q3 filing from Friends of Stace Nelson. They raised $43,765.55. Only $1,980.94 of that came from Stace's pocket. 41 itemized donors thus gave the Nelson campaign $41,785.61, 11% more than Bosworth got from her donors with a full month head start of official campaigning. Take out the $2433.01 contributed to the Nelson campaign by Stace's lovely wife, and he still beats Bosworth, whose husband Chad does not appear on her donor list. (Chad is surely saving up to by himself a locked desk.)
Nelson's itemized donors are all South Dakotans, while Bosworth got $7,500 from itemized out-of-staters. Team Nelson has zero debt and no plans to sell or raffle his farm and make his girls live in a van by the river this winter.
These figures are all laughably small potatoes beneath the $607K that establishment-GOP frontrunner Marion Michael Rounds raised third quarter and the one million dollars he already has on hand to crush Bosworth, Nelson, and anyone else challenging his coronation.
But if winning the anti-Rounds pre-primary counts for anything, the third-quarter FEC filings indicate that Team Nelson is running a tighter fiscal ship than Team Bosworth.