Presidential Politicin'
From the lede of a story set to go for Sunday's paper:
GREENSBORO - As a key fundraising deadline passed at midnight Saturday night, folks like Robert Lloyd, of Greensboro, figured into presidential hopefuls' campaign strategy just as much as high rollers who shell out $1,500 a plate for heavily sauced chicken and rice.The 80-year-old probate lawyer has kicked in a total of $300 toward Arizona Sen. John McCain's campaign, according to Federal Election Commission reports. That's far below the $2,300 per-person donation limit for the primary and a tiny fraction of what any candidate will need to be competitive.
Leading candidates for their party's nomination are expected to top $20 million apiece in fundraising for April, May and June, while candidates such as McCain are expected to bring in more than $10 million.
E-mail messages from former U.S. Sen. John Edwards' campaign say he aims to top $9 million.
"Until the election, there are only two ways to keep score: polls and money," said Gary Pearce, a Democratic political consultant from Raleigh. While money isn't the end-all of a campaign's performance, candidates need to be seen as raising enough to be taken seriously, Pearce said.
Click here for the full story.
The data for this story came from the FEC. Particularly helpful was its interactive map which lets you narrow contributions down by zip-code grouping.
After that, it was pretty much a matter of calling people up and asking them to speak their mind.
Yes, former Sen. John Edwards got some extra play in the story (although not the lede) because he's from here and he raised the most money in North Carolina during the first quarter.
How much other candidates got into the story really depended on how a combination of how much they raised, how many donors they had local to Greensboro and High Point and how chatty their partisans were. Rudy Giuliani, for example, didn't get much time because he didn't have a lot of donors from the area and the couple I called didn't respond.
And yes, we're going to get a whole bunch of campaign finance data for the second quarter here in the coming weeks. That's fine. My interest was as much in what motivated people to give to candidate as what they had to say about their particular would-be standard bearer.
Your thoughts, of course, welcome via the comments link below.