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Fundraising: Greg Abbott Trounces Wendy Davis.

While the official reports are not yet available for examination, Texas gubernatorial candidates Republican Greg Abbott and Democrat Wendy Davis both released (through press releases) top-line fundraising figures for the second half of 2013.

The winner: Greg Abbott, by a long shot.

A couple of interesting things to note here.

1) Wendy Davis' fundraising momentum apparently slowed down after she declared for Governor. She raised more in her Texas Senate officeholder account (likely overwhelmingly in early July, but we'll see) than in her gubernatorial account.

2) For months, we've been hearing how Wendy Davis is going to raise $10+ million dollars in the second half of 2013. She raised $8.7. A big fail.

Oddly, though, Wendy Davis' campaign performed a bit of fuzzy math plastic surgery and added $3.5 million from an additional, separate committee (Texas Victory Committee, Inc., which is apparently an offshoot of the Obama-affiliated Battleground Texas) to the mix. And most journalists just let her get away with it. Some establishment media outlets even declared Davis the winner. Fox News-- inexplicably-- reported $12.5 million for Davis, which makes absolutely no sense. Even some Texas media figures, who should know better, promoted the bogus notion that Davis "won" the fundraising period:

As one veteran Texas newsman put it on his Facebook page this morning:

Apparently, Wendy Davis in a first that I know of, counted money raised by the coordinated campaign as her own. Coordinated campaigns do help the candidates, but both parties run them, and I've never seen a candidate count the coordinated money toward their own fundraising. Lame fundraising report tactics to get a good headline don't erase realities, and they undermine the integrity and veracity of a candidate.

Integrity. Veracity.

Important qualities for a lengthy campaign.

Wendy Davis' amateur hour campaign has already frittered away a great deal of credibility with her not-ready-for-primetime appearances and strange and hypocritical attacks. These campaign finance shenanigans may do irreparable damage to the remaining strands of her credibility, although I wouldn't count on the fawning news coverage ending anytime soon, given the partisan proclivities of the press.

That said, there are only so many questionable incidents that even those rooting for her will be willing to tolerate before those all-important trust-related qualities, integrity and veracity, are appended with the word "lacks," beforehand.

When the actual reports hit the Texas Ethics Commission website, it will be interesting to see just how little cash on hand Wendy Davis has relative to Greg Abbott. It will also be interesting to cast a critical eye on the actual numbers and see what percentage of funds came from out-of-state individuals and entities.

As a benchmark, Greg Abbott's campaign says that he has $27 million cash on hand and that 97% of his donors are from Texas.

Texas is still a conservative state. Wendy Davis may have raised a great deal of money from liberals in liberal bastions, but the bottom line is that she still didn't raise as much as Greg Abbott in an apples to apples comparison of actual campaign accounts, and she likely trails by tens of millions dollars in actual cash on hand.

Moreover, how quickly we forget that Rick Perry was outspent (sometimes by absurd margins) in essentially every campaign he ran for Texas Governor, but he won by big margins each time.

Wendy Davis could raise tens of millions of dollars, but ultimately, she is pro-Obamacare, anti-gun, anti-voter ID, against the policies that cultivated the Texas energy boom, and for taxpayer-funded and elective late-term abortion.

2014 is not the year to be for/against the things Wendy Davis is for/against. Not in a lot of places across this country, but certainly not in Texas.

Posted by Will Franklin · 15 January 2014 10:07 AM

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