Monday, April 23, 2007

Most unlimited contributions going to Blunt, Nixon

Another of the flaws of Missouri's new wave of unlimited campaign contributions has been shown during the first reports, according to an article in today's St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
While the money is pouring into the coffers of Governor Matt Blunt and his challenger, Attorney General Jay Nixon, lower level candidates and political parties are receiving less. And, as you might expect, there are concerns that with that much money coming from a few sources, the voice of the average voter is going to be lost (you would have thought people would have seen that one coming):

Blunt's report shows that he received a whopping $3 million from about 500 donors during the past six months, while Nixon raised $1.3 million from roughly 2,000 contributors. Dozens of their donors gave $5,000 or more, and eight of Blunt's contributors wrote $100,000 checks. Advertisement

But the rest of the state's top officeholders or candidates were, with few exceptions, left with the scraps.

All of the campaign contributions for the top 14 of Missouri's other statewide officeholders, legislative leaders and declared statewide candidates totaled less than $1 million. And little of that money came from any of the top donors to Blunt or Nixon.

"The governor's race is sucking up most of the cash," said local Republican consultant Paul Zemitzsch
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