Congressman Coffman may not have had the best couple of weeks recently, but he can thank his lucky stars that he has been blessed with a pathetic challenger in state Rep. Joe Miklosi (D-Denver), and the most recent fundraising report provides the latest proof of that.
In the pre-primary period covering April 1 – June 6, Coffman nearly doubled Miklosi's fundraising, hauling in $325,00 to Miklosi's mere $175,000. To put that in perspective, Miklosi got his biggest chance to fundraise off of a Coffman mistake, most likely the biggest one Miklosi will get, and yet he raised less this period than he did in the first quarter of 2012.
Pathetic.
Seeing that it took Miklosi two entire weeks to put together a poorly produced web video on Coffman's Obama comments, you could probably sense the poor fundraising report coming. Or maybe it's just a curse after Miklosi stiffed his first fundraising director of her full salary.
Coffman's strong fundraising is also a sign that he is still far and away the favored candidate in the race. Since June 6, Coffman's utter fundraising dominance has only increased, with Miklosi reporting only $2,000 to Coffman's $50,000 in donations over $1,000.
Even more damaging details come from digging into the financial reports for both candidates. Despite not knowing who is working for his own campaign, and bragging that the Washington, DC based DCCC is paying for much of his staff, Miklosi still managed to burn through $114,000 of the paltry $175,000 he raised, an unsustainable burn rate this far out from the election.
Miklosi now has less than $400,000 cash on hand, compared to Coffman's nearly $1.6 million. With the Denver media market likely to get much more expensive come the fall, with every outside group and political party committee expected to drop six figure sums into advertising, this is going to be a problem for Miklosi.
While candidates, by law, have access to cheaper ad rates, you can't buy much TV time with the pittance Miklosi has in his campaign account.
At this point, we're betting the NRCC is starting to look at taking a larger chunk of the $1.6 million they reserved in the Denver media market and putting it toward knocking out Ed Perlmutter with Joe Coors.
(Correction: We originally misidentified Coffman as the one not paying his staff member. It was Miklosi who is the deadbeat boss. We regret the error. Hopefully Miklosi regrets his own.)