By Adam Pagnucco.
Last week, I wrote a series about fundraising in Congressional District 6 and also a post on Will Jawando’s U.S. Senate fundraising. I planned to write a more extensive series on fundraising in the Senate race but there is a problem:
With Jawando exiting the contest, Prince George’s County Executive Angela Alsobrooks is the only candidate left who is raising real money.
The chart below shows total receipts through the third quarter of 2023 for each of the six U.S. Senate candidates who have reported to the U.S. Federal Election Commission (FEC). Democrats appear in blue bars and Republicans appear in red ones.
Congressman David Trone leads in total receipts with almost $10 million, but $9.8 million of that comes from self-funding. With Jawando gone, every candidate in the race is primarily a self-funder except for Alsobrooks. At this moment in time, the percentage of total receipts accounted for by self-funding is 98% for Trone, 59% for Juan Dominguez, 99% for Robin Ficker and 100% for Lorie Friend. By contrast, 97% of Alsobrooks’s take came from individuals. She gave herself $500, the equivalent of a big shopping trip at Wegmans.
Alsobrooks’s total so far of $3.26 million is short of Chris Van Hollen’s pace in the first two quarters of his 2015-16 Senate campaign, when he raised $4.22 million. To be fair, Van Hollen was coming off a long tenure in the U.S. House, was a two-time chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and had fundraising connections across the nation. Considering those advantages, Alsobrooks’s numbers look pretty good.
Trone did raise $207,838 from sources other than himself. That’s below the $750k raised by Jawando but it’s not nothing. The chart below uses FEC raw data to show how Alsobrooks (in green) and Trone (in red) compared in fundraising from individuals residing in Maryland’s local areas. This does not include unitemized small individual contributions, of which Alsobrooks received $269,321 and Trone received $28,810.
Alsobrooks smoked Trone in individual contributions from every part of Maryland. Interestingly, Trone’s take from Montgomery County residents ($48,605) was about a quarter of what Jawando raised from there ($204,649). All told, Alsobrooks raised $1.82 million from Maryland residents and another $1.07 million from out-of-state residents. In terms of contributions from individuals, she leads Trone by 18 to 1.
Look, having worked for a self-funding candidate, I get it. Trone is not actively fundraising. He is out on the trail, which is a much better use of his time. Meanwhile, Alsobrooks’s phone is her best friend because it has to be. She needs to raise every penny she can to be heard against the tens of millions that Trone will pour into this race.
And right now, she is getting that job done.