KS-04 Roundup: Campaign Finance Documents Released

In a week where Raj Goyle hit a campaign fundraising record that no other challenger to KS-04 has ever reached, it appears the Republican challengers to that seat performed rather…well…boringly.

Here’s the run down:

(Editor’s Note: Jean Schodorf and Jim Anderson will be included in later analysis.  These two candidates chose not to e-file their reports, adding 48 to 72 hours for the FEC reporting time.)

Dick Kelsey

We’ve previously reported before that, during the last quarter, Kelsey spotted his campaign around $220,000 and raised another roughly $7,000 in private funds.  For this quarter, it appears Kelsey again proved to not be too interested in doing any fundraising, only raking in only around $8,800 for this quarter.

Pretty depressing for somebody running for Congress with an included and always suspicious $5,100 in “unitemized contributions.” (Report PDF.) More important, those flashy TV spots that Kelsey ran night and day over the last quarter–those ads cost Kelsey over $150,000.

Kelsey, for his part, though, is bragging that he’s now in the lead for the Republican nomination to the KS-04 Congressional seat, with Jean Schodorf following him up.

From the Wichita Eagle…

In the race for the 4th District, Kelsey released results of a poll commissioned by his campaign that showed him with a narrow lead over Sen. Jean Schodorf, R-Wichita, for the top spot in a five-way Republican primary.

The poll also showed it remains anybody’s race with 49 percent of voters undecided or declining to state a preference.

The survey of 351 likely Republican primary voters showed Kelsey with 17 percent and Schodorf with 15 percent. Hartman, a late entrant into the race, was third with 8 percent.

Republican National Committeeman Mike Pompeo was fourth at 6 percent and Jim Anderson, a small-business owner and retired airline pilot, had 4 percent.

The poll has a margin of error of 4.35 percentage points.

The problem: the margin of error may as well be 435 percentage points with 51% of the Republican electorate still undecided. And there isn’t much weight to a recent Kansas Republican Assembly straw poll showing Dick Kelsey with 5,110 Republican votes out of 12,329 cast.  Even the KRA is willing to admit that “[m]ultiple votes are allowed from the same IP after a small time out period…” and “clearly a few campaigns motivated some folks to sit by the computer and vote their heart out.”  Though that disclaimer didn’t stop Kelsey from posting an update saying he had won the poll, of course without disclosing those certain voting irregularities.

To be sure, Kelsey must show some value to the inputs he’s made on his campaign to date.  He’s spent a chunk of his own personal booty to make this dream a reality: he needs for show himself as a top contender for the seat so he doesn’t look like that fool that spent $180,000 on needless self-promotion.  At the end of the day, though, Kelsey’s strategy may have given him the appearance of financial inferiority: he’s only got just over $60,000 cash on hand.

Mike Pompeo

The Kansas GOP’s RNC Committeeman, Pompeo was one of the first contenders to have an interest in the KS-04 seat back in April.  The Pompeo campaign, however, has been relatively mum throughout the year, with a few endorsements, most notably the June endorsement by mother-son duo, Wichita City Councilwoman Sue Schlapp and 2000 recount rioter (Rioter #6) Matt Schlapp.  For the third quarter, Pompeo raised nearly $99,000 yet had over $60,000 in campaign expenses leaving him with just over $270,000 cash on hand.  (Report PDF.)

Wink Hartman

Hartman, who this writer fears seeks to rename all of Wichita after himself, has more money than God, and, according to the Wichita Eagle, is the only candidate in the race with the capacity to self-fund his own campaign, managed to raise a total $18,375 and reported having $16,045 cash on hand. While that may seem like peanuts, Hartman only announced his candidacy for the seat on September 16 with the fundraising quarter closing on September 30, leaving only two weeks to raise money for the third quarter. At $1,000 a day, it’s strong fundraising challenge, but the question is whether he can sustain the fundraising after the initial buzz of his campaign wears off and the rough and tumble begins.

End Game

Kansas State Representative Raj Goyle, according to his own campaign, raised just over $400,000 in the October quarterly. By early next week we’ll know whether Goyle became the number one fundraiser in this quarter in KS-04. If he does, it’s a real feather in his hat, concreting his role in the Republican-leaning KS-04 district as a real contender. With nearly 10 months remaining until the August 2010 primary, Goyle has lots of time to  continue to raise the greenbacks and let his Republican opponents wage a battle.