Connecticut Local Politics

The Cappiello campaign is reporting that they’ve raised $446,157 this quarter, and now have $710,646 cash on hand. The campaign reports raising $1.114 million total this cycle. Says Cappiello:

“Two years ago, the American public expressed their desire for change in Washington, but nobody asked for the mess we’ve been given by Congress in the last two years. [...] The financial support our campaign has received is proof that Connecticut voters want a representative that will provide results for them, not empty rhetoric and press conferences.”

Okay. So a big, respectable haul for David Cappiello, right? Well… it isn’t quite as cut and dried as that. If you take a look at the FEC filing for Cappiello for Congress you’ll see that in fact that committee raised only about $123,322 from direct contributions from 4/21 to 6/30. They raised about $138K total for the quarter.

The rest of the money came from Cappiello-Connecticut Victory 08, which is a joint fundraising account set up by the Connecticut Republicans and the Cappiello campaign. They were the beneficiaries of the extremely successful fundraiser with President Bush at Henry Kissenger’s place in Kent back in April, and they have, according to this list of disbursements, given quite a bit of that money (well over $300,000) to the Cappiello campaign.

Still, with the help of the president and the state GOP, the Cappiello campaign finds itself in relatively decent shape heading down the stretch. They are not, however, in as good a shape as Chris Murphy is right now, or in fact as Murphy was at this point in 2006, when he had $1.02 million on hand. Cappiello is still in far better financial health than Sean Sullivan, though, and for that the GOP should be thankful.

Update 8:52pm Okay, I understand the way this works a little better, and I took the asterisk off the headline. As I understand it, a contribution to the joint fundraising account that is then allocated to the Cappiello campaign does in fact count towards a contributors’ contribution limit to Cappiello, so in essence it’s like contributing directly to the campaign, just in a twisty sort of way. So while Cappiello was indeed the beneficiary of a big fundraiser featuring President Bush, if that had been hosted exclusively by Cappiello’s campaign and had not included the CTGOP, we wouldn’t see two numbers at all.

The bottom line doesn’t change: Cappiello has $710,000 on hand.