Political Fundraising

An interesting article from Pundits guide. It confirms the Tory fundraising juggernaut, but points out it takes money to make money. The grits continue to do badly inspite of ( because of?) the iffy tours. We should be getting Q4 numbers fairly soon , so we will see how things turned out in 2010.

Of note, while the Liberals were obviously well behind where they had been the year before ($4.41M by the end of Q3-2010 vs. $7.56M by the end of Q3-2009) — which was partly to be expected because of the 2009 convention, but partly a surprise to me because of the Liberal Express bus tour and gun registry in summer 2010 — the one thing they have been doing better at is increasing the proportion raised from small donors, compared with the same time last year (92.0% by the end of Q3-2010 as compared with 85.7% at the same point in 2009), and posting an increase in the number of small donors as well. The total contributed in the $200 and under category is still down year over year, however. The non-Convention quarters of over $200 contributions were down as well.

At this stage, the Liberals would have to post fourth quarter contributions of something like $5.15M to match last year's totals as reported on the four quarterly returns. $1.49M would at least get them to where they were at the end of 2008.