https://twitter.com/RepAOC/status/1297307720907927553
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I think she has really good instincts. Today it would have been really easy for her to rant, but she instead seemed focused, mature and restrained. She knows she has all the credibility she will ever need as a fighter, and chose to use the platform in a way that will endear her to her colleagues. I truly think she’s a generational political talent.
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Who fundraises for her? She raises A LOT of money regardless of how it’s done. Her campaign raised around $12.6m for the primary and spent nearly $10m from what I can tell. She’s number 5 on the most well funded candidates list. Here’s the top 10:
- Steve Scalise-$26m
- Kevin McCarthy-$16.8m
- Devin Nunes-$16.3m
- Nancy Pelosi-$14.4m
- AOC-$12.6m
- Adam Schiff-$12.3m
- Dan Crenshaw-$9.3m
- Gym Jordan-$9.2m
- Darrell Issa-$8.2m
- Katie Porter-$8.2m
No matter which side of the aisle you’re on, it’s disgusting this kind of money needs to be raised for a ‘people’s seat’ that pays $174,000 per year and lasts only 2 years.
In case you’re wondering about a few others:
Ilhan Omar-$4.3m
Rashida Tlaib-$3m
Ayanna Pressley-$1.7m
Ted Lieu-$1.2m
Matt Graetz-$3m
It becomes very difficult for a sitting Congressperson to win on less than $700k, with the notable exceptions of Peter Welch and Sylvia Garcia at around $500k and Al Green at around $300k. That’s still so much money. There are obviously a number of sitting Republicans in very safe districts that can get away with the $300k range. Jamaal Bowman’s primary win was sweet because I think he raised just shy of $200k (probably the cheapest primary win to actual seat in this cycle). The Tennessee Democratic Senate primary winner raised practically nothing, but she really doesn’t have any kind of shot there so it’s hard to put that in the same context as a person who will actually get the seat they won the primary of.
I personally believe a House candidate can create more than enough reach to win a primary in a moderately safe Democratic district for well less than $100k and that number might be closer to $50k…or gasp…even lower. The problem is no one tries to do that because they think it isn’t possible.
I think the distinction AOC tries to make is that she doesn’t spend much if any time calling/meeting with individual big dollar donors and bundlers. The typical Congressperson spends several hours a day making those calls.
AOC, on the other hand, can raise a lot of smaller individual donations via a single tweet or, frankly, just crushing at a hearing and having that inspire people to contribute. She’s more efficient because it’s mass outreach instead of one on one persuasion.
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Yeah, but this only works for a few Representatives max. Only 6% of her contributions from last election were known to have come from inside her district. It’s just not possible to have lots of Reps with anywhere near her national profile even if they were all awesome.
I get that, I was just curious as to how she does it because she has to be spending some time fundraising to raise the kind of money she has. I also know she’s much less beholden to donors than anyone on that list. My main ‘gripe’ is that she didn’t actually need to raise that money or spend that money because she went in office and did what she said she was going to do and still listened to external forces who claimed she was vulnerable (she was not). The power of the money overwhelmed any opponents she had, which in my eyes slightly diminishes her victory and doesn’t really speak to how money doesn’t matter.
Her main opponent in this primary raised nearly $3.4m and got 1/4 of her votes, a paltry 11k, which is laughable to me. The guy who finished 3rd with 3k votes raised $69k. The guy who finished last with 1,406 votes did not report raising any money with the FEC.
As a litmus, the primary I ran in had about 10k fewer people vote in it (very high turnout) and no one outside of the incumbent raised any significant amount of money. Even with the one person with 11k votes against AOC, her opponents still received only a slightly larger percentage of the vote than we did. It took a massive amount of money (more than wins most seats) to get 18 percent of the vote against AOC. She wasn’t vulnerable at all but the media can be a powerful drug to even really smart people.
Totally! Why even attend? It clearly subtracts from valuable dick sucking time. This guy gets it.
I agree with you. The funny thing is that I truly do believe a stealth candidate can sneak up on them and win a primary (AOC did this in 2018 though she didn’t do it with a small amount of money like it seemed). There’s no way Engel should have lost to Bowman, but he’s a fossil who didn’t get it and Bowman seemed to do a very good job in his campaign.
Most primaries don’t have polling and if you spend just low enough below the radar you won’t get their attention unless your message is really strong and even that attention won’t mean anything unless you have a decent amount of money behind you (I think you get attention the moment you raise more than $100k and then the DCCC will try to crush your challenge).
I don’t think you, PocketChads, would be able to win something on as little money as I’m describing because you’re a known entity in your area and a lot of people would potentially come out against you. That said, I’m fairly convinced you could win an election if you wanted to win one but that it would be more likely you’d need to raise more money than you’d like to do so. Activists do struggle to win in primaries even with money because of how rigid the DCCC is. The others who can do damage in a primary almost always have electoral history somewhere making it much easier for the DCCC to come after them to put out any fires they might bring.