By Adam Pagnucco.
With the very last reports filed prior to the primary, let’s review fundraising in the Congressional District 6 race.
The data source of this series is the campaign finance information collected by the U.S. Federal Election Commission (FEC). The chart below shows total fundraising for each candidate from the FEC’s CD6 profile. Democrats appear in blue bars and Republicans appear in red ones. Note that these totals go through March 31 for Destiny Drake West as she has not filed her pre-primary reports as of this writing. (They were due on May 2). Democrats George Gluck and Kiambo White have not filed regular reports. For all other candidates, the totals are through April 24.
Among the Democrats, April McClain Delaney, the spouse of former District 6 Congressman John Delaney, is the runaway leader. That’s due in part to her loans of $1.05 million to her campaign. Delegate Joe Vogel and Hagerstown Mayor Tekesha Martinez are next. Navy veteran Tom Royals leads the Republicans. Candidates who have dropped out include Democrats Geoffrey Grammer, Joel Rubin and Peter Choharis (all of whom have endorsed Delaney) and Republican Heath Barnes.
Before a closer examination of the individual candidates, let’s examine their combined fundraising. The pie chart below shows the broad categories of contributions in CD 6.
Contributions from individuals accounted for 66% of all fundraising in the district. They accounted for 60% of fundraising for Democrats and 84% of fundraising for Republicans.
Most candidates received at least 70% of their funding from individuals. In contrast, self-funding accounted for 80% of Grammer’s receipts, 78% of Republican Chris Hyser’s receipts, 62% of Republican Brenda Thiam’s receipts and 54% of Delaney’s receipts.
Vogel led the way in PAC receipts with 16% of his funding coming from them. (This does not count contributions routed through Act Blue.) Vogel, Delaney and Delegate Lesley Lopez also received a bit of money from other candidate accounts, mostly from outside the district.
Just because individual contributions dominate most candidates’ fundraising, that does not mean that CD6 residents are financing these campaigns. We will have more in Part Three.