Continuing to look at campaign disclosures, I found a couple of good things and a couple of not so good things when looking at Karen Handel’s.
Ms. Handel reported bringing in $431,179 overall, and had the highest total ‘working man’ unitemized contributions, at $29,313. Of the remaining $402,026 in itemized contributions, only $24,600 of that was for any election other than the Primary (specifically, that entire number was for the General Election), and even better than that, only $2,250 was from out of state. Meaning that Ms. Handel actually accepted less out of state itemized contributions than the campaign billing itself as ‘Georgia First’!
Getting into some of the slightly more troubling news, $11,575 was from lobbyists and PACs, while only $4,200 was from elected officials/campaigns – and it should be noted here that the campaigns that donated to Ms. Handel were strictly at the City and County levels. Not a single campaign for a General Assembly position or higher donated more than $101 to Ms. Handel, though it is certainly possible that a few gave her under that amount and therefore did not have to be itemized. PeachPundit.com commenter Doug Deal is listed as giving Handel $250 – not disturbing really, just something I wanted to note here, just for transparency purposes.
But the most disturbing part of this report, at least for this South Georgia boy? 48% of Handel’s total itemized contributions, $196,035, came from within the City of Atlanta itself, and if the Atlanta Metro area is considered, that number bumps up to $346,810 – or 86%.
I have heard that it is possible to at least win the GOP nomination with nothing more than extremely strong support in the North Fulton County area and something like 10% of the vote in the entire rest of the State, and if that is accurate, based on these numbers it appears that testing that theory will be absolutely imperative for Ms. Handel’s campaign, unless she can figure out how to draw more support from throughout the State.
July 15th, 2009 |
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