Sal "Piss Boy" Pace needs to haul in some hefty loads of cash to have even a snowball's chance in hell to beat incumbent Congressman Scott Tipton in the Third Congressional District. He is virtually unknown outside Pueblo and will be on the ticket with the President in a district that Obama couldn't even capture in 2008 — that is if he makes it past a likely primary against Dr. Perry Haney. To help his uphill campaign he needs to put up eye-popping fundraising numbers, but most importantly beat Tipton in fundraising. In the third quarter he failed on both accounts.
He leaked his haul of 165k before the fundraising report was due on the 15th, hoping to drive positive stories. Now that other campaigns' numbers are coming in for comparison, his fundraising effort is looking punier by the day.
A source close to Tipton's campaign tells the Peak that Tipton's third quarter fundraising haul will "comfortably" beat Pace's total.
That is good news for Tipton, who had a lackluster fundraising period in the second quarter. While Tipton has been a bit wobbly out of the gate, beating Pace by a good margin will help inspire confidence among his supporters and the wider GOP community in Colorado who became concerned about the lack of fundraising earlier in the year.
As we said in our post yesterday, there is a new day dawning for conservative fundraising for 2012 that will make candidate fundraising virtually obsolete in competitive races. We also noted its value is mostly about helping set campaign narratives about a candidate's viability and underlying support. By that measure Pace's fundraising is not helpful to his campaign.
As CD3 is likely to be the most competitive down ticket race in 2012, you can be sure American Crossroads and other conservative heavy-hitters will be swinging for the fences.
Even worse news for Pace's fundraising narrative came in the form of a Peter Marcus tweet that announced that CD4 candidate and Pace's state Senate counterpart Brandon Shaffer raised $180,000. Neither of those amounts cut it as positive in competitive, Presidential-year races, but being beaten by Shaffer must be a particularly sore point in Pace’s world.
As Pace has spent his entire career in politics, mostly based in the 3rd Congressional district, it was expected he would be able to leverage his relationships with Democrat Party donors to raise big dollars this quarter. The fact that he wasn't speaks volumes about the relative weakness of his candidacy.
Maybe our story about his illustrious and lengthy criminal record hit his campaign pocketbook after all.