Once Again Her We Go Know the Name Know the Flo
Democratic Dollars Flow In one case Once again to Likely Lost Causes
New fund-raising figures show emerging Democratic stars like Marcus Flowers in Georgia and Gary Chambers Jr. in Louisiana, with no clear path to victory.
Gary Chambers Jr. outburst onto the national scene in 2022 with a viral video of him castigating the racism of the East Billy Rouge school district. Now, he has captured the hearts and wallets of young liberals with a video for his improbable Senate campaign that shows him smoking a large joint and calling for the legalization of marijuana.
He has almost no paths to victory over a sitting Republican senator in a ruby-red state like Louisiana. Merely he has raised $i.2 million.
The same most likely goes for the Rev. Jasmine Beach-Ferrara, a gay minister who has raised $1.4 1000000 to oust Representative Madison Cawthorn, the far-right Republican, from his North Carolina seat. And for Marcus Flowers, a cowboy-hat-wearing veteran in Georgia who raised $2.4 million just in the first three months of the yr to try to dislodge Marjorie Taylor Greene from a heavily Republican district.
Every ballot yr in recent cycles, celebrity Democratic candidates have emerged — either on the strength of their personalities, the notoriety of their Republican opponents or both — to rake in entrada cash, and then lose impossible elections. Some Democrats say such races are draining money from more winnable campaigns, but the candidates insist that fifty-fifty in losing, they are helping the political party by pulling voters in for statewide races, bolstering the Democratic make and broadening the party's entreatment.
"Nosotros are asking folks to bring together the states, bring together united states of america in winning this race and doing the organizing nosotros need," Ms. Embankment-Ferrara said in an interview, "and to say we tin't look at the map and say nosotros aren't running there. When you practice that you get a Madison Cawthorn in office."
As starting time-quarter fund-raising numbers gyre in, the stars are emerging. The biggest bucks belong to incumbents. Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, a Republican widely viewed as vulnerable this year, was criticized six years agone for anemic fund-raising; this time around, he raised well-nigh $viii.7 meg in the first quarter. Senator Raphael Warnock, a Georgia Democrat facing a hard re-ballot, raised $13.6 million against the $5.ii million raised by his master Republican opponent, Herschel Walker.
Competitive races are already awash in coin. Representative Val Demings, Democrat of Florida, raised more than $10 1000000 to challenge Senator Marco Rubio, who raised $five.8 one thousand thousand.
So there'south Mr. Flowers, whose $2.4 meg haul in the beginning quarter hands topped Ms. Greene'south $1.1 one thousand thousand, in a Northwest Georgia commune that has given Republicans 75 pct of the vote since it was created in 2012.
Mr. Flowers has proved remarkably proficient at raising minor-dollar donations with a barrage of emails — sometimes multiple emails each 24-hour interval — that capitalize on the behavior of the far-right congresswoman he is running confronting. An Ground forces veteran who served in combat, he has emphasized his military service, talking tough while attacking Ms. Greene'due south sympathy for the Jan. 6 rioters and far-right conspiracy theories.
Jon Soltz, the co-founder and chairman of VoteVets.org, a liberal veterans organization that gave Mr. Flowers the maximum commanded contribution, said support was not necessarily near winning the seat simply holding Ms. Greene in check and using his run to elevate her profile as the face of the Republican Party in suburban districts that are more winnable.
"She can't exist complimentary to travel around the country and spew her lies and disinformation," Mr. Soltz said. "We're making her spend her money."
In the process, Mr. Flowers can build proper noun recognition for hereafter runs and might energize the Democrats who live in Northwest Georgia to come out and vote for him, Mr. Warnock and the Democratic candidate for governor, Stacey Abrams.
Prototype
Prototype
Ms. Beach-Ferrara is similarly buoyed by her opponent, Mr. Cawthorn, the young confront of far-right conservatism in the Trump era. A married lesbian mother of three, Ms. Embankment-Ferrara insists her unlikely life story will help her in a commune where an influx of politically active outsiders in the Asheville area could change the region'south direction.
N Carolina'due south 11th House commune, with new lines, is slightly less Republican than it was in 2020, when Mr. Cawthorn was outset elected. She said Mr. Trump all the same would take won it by 10 percent points but the state's Democratic governor, Roy Cooper, would have lost by only 4 points.
Her reward two years later comes from disenchantment with Mr. Cawthorn, whose antics — he has chosen Ukraine's president a thug and most recently said his colleagues had invited him to cocaine-filled orgies — have prompted seven Republicans to challenge him in the upcoming primary.
"Every bit people walk away from Cawthorn, our chore is to meet them," she said, adding, "For those who don't know what to brand of a gay Christian minister, what is very clear with them is I'm being honest with them from the showtime."
In Senator John Kennedy, Republican of Louisiana, Mr. Chambers does not have the villain that Democrats take made nationally of Ms. Greene. His entrada is based on his irreverent appeal — an outspoken Black progressive voice willing to smoke weed in a commercial, burn a Confederate flag and phone call white schoolhouse lath members racist to their faces for defending a school named after Robert E. Lee.
He raised $800,000 in the offset 3 months of the yr from 18,500 donors. The average contribution was $41, many of those small-dollar donors youthful and excited, the campaign said.
Critics say such campaigns are more about edifice the brand of Democratic consultants than making a play for a Senate seat. The man who created Mr. Chambers's marijuana and Confederate flag ads, Erick Sanchez, helped run Andrew Yang's presidential entrada and likewise hawks "Fouch on the Couch" throw pillows of Dr. Anthony Fauci for $40 a pop.
But Randy Jones, one of Mr. Chambers'south campaign chiefs, said the candidate should not be discounted. Mr. Chambers, he said, is taking a page from Ms. Abrams, who energized Georgia voters of colour, urban liberals and the scatterings of rural Democrats to nearly win the governorship four years ago, build a political arrangement and set herself upwards for a rematch this twelvemonth with the Republican governor, Brian Kemp.
Mr. Jones ran the campaign of another celebrity Democrat, Richard Ojeda of Westward Virginia, whose House campaign in 2022 was instructive in other ways. Mr. Ojeda, a trash-talking Bronze Star winner, sought to remake his party'due south image in his emerging Republican stronghold as more muscular and more working class. He raised almost $3 million, then lost by nearly 13 percentage points.
Epitome
Embittered by the experience, Mr. Ojeda moved to N Carolina to exit a home state he describes with the same epithet Mr. Trump used for developing countries. He uses his political notoriety to lift his group No Dem Left Behind, which promotes candidates in rural Republican areas, equally he builds a new house.
Even every bit he defended his campaign, Mr. Ojeda criticizes the party in ways that echo criticism of his own endeavor. Democrats across the country dumped hundreds of millions of dollars into the Senate campaigns of Jaime Harrison in South Carolina and Amy McGrath in Kentucky, when the money could have been spent on more winnable local races, he said. He insisted he could have won if Mr. Trump hadn't come to his corner of Westward Virginia twice.
But he besides sees no betoken in e'er trying again in a state so thoroughly Republican in the Trump era.
"West Virginia is going to have to burn to the ground earlier information technology volition always rise from the ashes — that's it," Mr. Ojeda said. "In W Virginia, all you can practise as a Democrat is stand up, fight the battle then information technology's recorded and say, 'You guys are total of'" it.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/19/us/politics/democratic-midterm-fundraising.html
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