Former State Senator Brian Kemp, a GOP candidate for Secretary of State, released his campaign’s fundraising numbers for the first half of 2009 along with 161 endorsements.
The overall number for his fundraising efforts, per this press release, was $267,170 from “over 425 donors”, or an average donation of roughly $625 per donor.*
Of the 161 endorsements listed by the campaign, 4 are current PSC members, 2 are on the DOT Board, 11 are Sheriffs, 22 are current or former Commissioners (including Commission Chairmen), 5 are current or former Mayors, 4 are Clerks of Court, 2 are current or former Tax Commissioners, 1 is a City Councilman, and 1 is a School Board member. The remaining 109 are current or former members of the General Assembly. All of the names that I recognized were Republicans, but that doesn’t mean there were no Democrats on the list – just none that I recognized.
What I find most interesting about this list is that of the non-General Assembly members noted above, Kemp’s support thus far seems to be centered in NE GA, in the general area of Athens. From South GA, he has the Sheriff and a County Commissioner from Chatham County (Savannah), a former Lee County Commission Chairman (Jimmy Dixon), and Tift County Commission Chairman Grady Thompson – and so far, that is IT. In other words, 4 of the 52 non-General Assembly endorsements he is claiming about came from the lower half of the state – and I was being generous and including anything south of Macon in that definition!
Honestly though, I haven’t heard too much out of the Secretary of State race so far, so who knows if any of this means anything. I just saw the press release from PeachPundit and thought y’all might like to hear about it, particularly since there has been a distinct lack of anything from that race on this site so far!
*(This was calculated using both 425 and 430 donors. For 425 donors, the average was ~$628.64, and for 430 donors it was ~$621.33. This was done to the ‘over’ in the release and is pure speculation that the number of donors was somewhere between 425 and 430, but I’m guessing that the campaign would have said ‘over 430 donors’ had there been 431 donors or more, with similar adjustments for every 5-10 donors.)
