By Adam Pagnucco.
Part One discussed issues with campaign finance data from the State Board of Elections (SBE). Part Two described differences between the traditional financing system used by Council Member Andrew Friedson and the public financing system used by Council Members Evan Glass and Will Jawando. Part Three reported receipts, expenditures and cash balance. Part Four looked at donor type. Part Five looked at contribution geography. Now let’s examine expenditures and burn rates.
Let’s start with this chart from Part Three showing total expenditures by candidate.
Friedson spent the most money but also raised the most. Glass spent the least money but raised slightly less than Jawando. Here are the top spending areas for each candidate.
Friedson: 44% of his spending for the cycle was on salaries and compensation, totaling $137,422. From March through September, this item averaged $12,633 a month. I think it’s a bit early in the campaign to be spending this much money on staff, but Friedson can clearly afford it.
Glass: 82% of his spending for the cycle was on media, totaling $50,186. Most of this ($48,503) was spent on online ads. I’m not a big fan of early spending – any kind of early spending – but if I were to do that, I would spend it on cheap ways to reach voters. Overall, Glass deserves credit for running by far the most frugal of the three campaigns.
Jawando: 47% of his spending for the cycle was on fundraising costs, totaling $63,693. This one blows my mind for two reasons. First, Jawando spent more on fundraising than did Friedson ($59,053) and yet Friedson raised more than twice as much even including Jawando’s pending matching funds requests. Second, Glass reported spending nothing on this category and yet raised only slightly less than Jawando.
If I were working for Jawando’s campaign, I would be asking whether all of this fundraising spending is truly necessary.
That brings us to burn rate, which is the percentage of receipts that has already been spent. This is an enormously important early stat for campaigns. The financial goal of any political campaign should be to raise as much money as possible early, hold down early expenses as much as possible and then spend the resulting mountain of money at the end on voter communications (like mail and TV). Campaigns that fail to control their early spending have little money for the big push required at the end. The ultimate cautionary tale of failure to control early spending is the 2022 campaign of council at-large candidate Brandy Brooks, who raised a lot of money, blew through most of it before mail season started and had few available resources when she needed them.
I have made two calculations of burn rates. The first is straightforward: expenditures divided by receipts for the cycle. Here they are:
Friedson: 19%
Glass: 13%
Jawando: 26%
The problem with those rates is that they don’t include pending matching funds requests by Glass and Jawando. They have earned those requests (or something close to them) through their in-county fundraising but they had not actually received that money when they filed their latest reports. If you include those pending matching funds requests, here are the resulting burn rates.
Friedson: 19%
Glass: 9%
Jawando: 19%
Glass has an advantage here. He raised less than Jawando, but as we saw in Part Three, he will have a slightly higher cash balance when the matching funds requests come in. That said, the difference between the two is not large and could be overwhelmed by future fundraising.
So how is this all likely to play out? I’ll offer my best guesses next.