Better to Give than to Receive?
September 23rd, 2009 by Nick SaintWith the exception of this man, every serious contender for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination plus Ron Paul has started a PAC (unless you thing Newt Gingrich or Charlie Crist is a serious contender). These outfits raise money and make donations to the campaigns of other Republicans the candidate supports. Chris Good has a roundup of the fund raising and donations of each of these PACs so far this year. You can click through to see the raw numbers. Here, I’m going to perform a simple calculation and post the results without comment. Here, in ascending order, are the ratios of funds raised to funds dispersed for each candidate:
- Ron Paul: .049
- Rick Santorum: .888
- Mike Huckabee: .905
- Harley Barbour: .965
- Mike Pence: 1.036
- Eric Cantor: 1.021
- Mitt Romney: 1.257
- Sarah Palin: 2.653!!
What? Bolding and punctuating aren’t commenting. I’m just sayin’.
September 23rd, 2009 at 4:49 pm
I don’t get it - is Ron Paul giving away money that he raised during the pres election cycle or taking out loans to give money away? Also, is a pres. candidate pushing around 4 and 5 figure sums ’serious’?
September 23rd, 2009 at 9:59 pm
Well, I haven’t looked at the source data myself, but note that this data is for this year. Ron Paul has never been mainstream, but he has a far from trivial following last year. It wouldn’t be surprising at all if his funding has dried up massively, so that outflows dwarfing inflows makes a lot of sense, for a while anyway.
And no, he isn’t serious. That’s why I said “plus Ron Paul”. I have a soft spot in my heart for the nutter, obviously, and agree with him about quite a few things, but there is a zero percent chance that he is the next GOP nominee.