By Adam Pagnucco.
As I did with the county executive candidates, it’s time to take a quick and dirty look at campaign finances for the council at-large candidates. Who has the resources to compete and win?
Let’s start with fundraising. The chart below shows receipts for the cycle for the candidates. The bars in dark green represent actual receipts while the bars in light green represent pending matching funds requests. All data comes from downloaded contributions spreadsheets as of May 12 plus listed matching funds requests on cover sheets. Note: I estimated Marc Elrich’s latest request from a later filing because his May 12 report is unavailable from the State Board of Elections (SBE) website. Also, Steve Solomon’s request had a blank field so his total may be slightly underestimated.
Let’s state the obvious: Scott Goldberg is freakin killing it and is in a class by himself. I can’t prove this at the moment since SBE’s awful website has deleted pre-2022 cycle data, but Goldberg may hold the all-time record for one-cycle council at-large fundraising in the public financing system. Next are County Executive Marc Elrich, Jeremiah Pope and Board of Education Member Karla Silvestre, the latter of whom did really well in March and April.
It’s a bit late for burn rate to be a useful stat since we are now at the point in the cycle when candidates should be spending money. Instead, let’s calculate a stat I used in the county executive analysis: voter outreach capacity. For the sake of this analysis, I define it as money already spent on TV, mail, digital and radio plus remaining cash on hand and the pending matching funds requests of the publicly financed candidates. The chart below illustrates this distribution.
Let’s restate the caveats with this stat. First, the candidates are still raising money. Second, some expenses may have been incurred but not reported as of May 12. And third, some of the remaining money will undoubtedly be spent on non-communications functions (like staff and overhead).
With all of that said, the pecking order looks similar to what we saw in raw fundraising: Goldberg out front followed by Elrich, Pope and Silvestre. First-time candidate Lelia True had more capacity to reach voters as of May 12 than an incumbent (Laurie-Anne Sayles) and two Apple Ballot candidates (Fatmata Barrie and Josie Caballero).
Now to cash management. In almost every cycle, there is a candidate who does a good job of raising money but spends a lot of it early and is low on funds late in the cycle. In 2018, it was Council Member George Leventhal, who was running for county executive. In 2022, it was second-time council at-large Brandy Brooks, who collapsed late. This time it’s Caballero.
Using spreadsheet downloads of contributions and expenditures, I estimated net cash at the end of the month for four candidates: Silvestre (in green), Sayles (in blue), Barrie (in orange) and Caballero (in red). Silvestre raised more than Caballero while Sayles and Barrie raised less. All four candidates had valuable endorsements. Check out the chart below showing trends in their cash balance since January 2025.
Silvestre, Sayles and Barrie gradually built up their cash balance to around $100,000 with Silvestre exceeding that. Then they began to spend. All three of them sent out mailers, which are usually the most expensive spending item for countywide council candidates. Then there is Caballero, who is a good fundraiser but spent money almost as fast as she raised it. Here’s one interesting bit: she received her first matching funds distribution on March 27 (for $67,977) and then paid nearly half of it ($32,000) to a San Diego consultant a day later. How does that help reach voters?
That’s not all. Caballero is the runaway leader among council at-large candidates in spending on salaries and compensation even though she is fifth in fundraising. She spent $87,675 on this measure, more than double any other campaign and 57% of her cash take. Staff are necessary but paying them this much squeezes out money for everything else.
The result of this is that Caballero might be able to get out a small mailer to a very limited universe but won’t be able to reach as many people as her top rivals. She has a ton of endorsements, is an aggressive door knocker and has done well in raising money, so if she loses, it will be because of bad cash management.
One more candidate deserves a comment: Silvestre. She did not stand out from the field early. Since then, she has been endorsed by MCGEO, the career and volunteer fire fighters, the police, SEIU Local 500, the realtors and a large group of current and former elected officials. She has also seen a fundraising surge in March and April. Sayles is the only incumbent in the race, Elrich is a virtual incumbent and Goldberg is the fundraising leader, but the candidate with growing momentum right now is Silvestre.