When not to run: Fundraising signals trouble at the polls
By Bill Donovan
Special to the Times
Sept. 2, 2010
I have seen this in election after election. People decide to run, hoping to get support, and then find that people will give verbal support but won't help financially, leaving the candidate in the lurch since it takes money to pay for all of those posters and radio/newspaper ads.
Take Jerry Jay Todacheene, for example.
Not the most well-known name on the reservation, he spent $4,558.07 on his campaign, including the $1,500 filing fee. The campaign expense form that he turned into the election office showed no outside contributors, meaning that he's on the hook personally for the entire tab.
Of the $3,058 he spent on his campaign, most of that - some $1,900 - went to KTNN for political ads. Most of the rest went for gasoline for his travels around the reservation.
In fact, except for the two top voter getters - Lynda Lovejoy and Ben Shelly - almost all of the other candidates had to put up a sizable portion of their campaign funds.
To mount a decent campaign costs at least $10,000, not including the $1,500 filing fee for president. So unless you have that kind of money to blow, start asking the friends and people who were telling you to run that you need them to put their money where their mouth is.
If you make it past the primary, it will be easier to raise money in the general election because you can show you've got support among the voters. But even then, unless you are the frontrunner, getting people to donate is difficult.
Another thing that candidates in future primaries should consider is whether it's worth their time to take part in the candidate forums that are held occasionally.
There were at least 10 such events leading up to the Aug. 3 primary and most were broadcast on the radio. And while it was good to get free radio exposure, the number of candidates at the forum put a severe limitation on how much air time each one got.
In most cases, individual candidates got a couple of minutes in the beginning and a couple at the end with two or three questions during the debate as well. And if you got a question that had nothing to do with the issues of the campaign, you had to worry that your answer might make you sound out of touch.
What seemed to work for Lovejoy was fundraising dinners, which not only fetched several thousand dollars but helped her energize her most loyal supporters.
Rallies also worked for some candidates, bringing in donations as well as radio exposure. For a while, KTNN seemed to be doing political broadcasts almost every other day and, indeed, most voters had little other recourse to learn something about the candidates.
All in all, this election proved that if you can't get your supporters to show you the money, you're probably better off not running.
Clarifcation: In last week's column, I closed with the line, "Don't cry for them, Dennehotso." Since then we've heard from a number of Dennehotso Chapter residents who asked if this was a reference to Katherine Benally, their council delegate. The answer is no, I chose the name solely because it has something of the same rhythm as "Argentina," as in "Don't Cry for Me, Argentina," the song made famous by Madonna and the first President Bush.
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