Spending in election for governor

Yesterday, Scott Milfred of the Wisconsin State Journal had an editorial in the paper about campaign spending. Most of the article was about how more candidates from Minnesota abide by spending limits and most from Wisconsin don't. However, there was one little paragraph in that editorial that was pretty irritating because it was so wrong.

Wisconsin Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle is predicted to spend $10 million or more this fall. U.S. Rep. Mark Green, R-Green Bay, is predicted to spend about $8 million.

This statement is the result of spin from the Green campaign. How many times have we seen newspapers fall for the "poor me, I'm going to be outspent by the big bad Democrat" line from Republican challengers?

Rep. Mark Green is not going to be outspent by $2 million in this race. When has a serious Republican challenger for office ever been outspent so badly?

I will grant the Republicans that they are good at this game of convincing the reporters that they will be outspent and that they are going to get almost all of their money from within the district or within the state. But they always end up with more money and a lot of it comes from outside the district or outside of Wisconsin.

How do they get away with this? They backload it to the last campaign finance report that doesn't get reported until after the election.

The best example of this was in 2000 when Senator Shelia Hardorf challenged then Senator Alice Clausing. Harsdorf bemoaned all of Clausing's campaign funds and complained she was going to be outspent. She also repeatedly hammered Clausing for her out-of-district money.

Harsdorf ended up spending over $100,000 more than Clausing on the race and her last campaign finance report, the one published after the election was over, reads like a who's who list of the Milwaukee area. This is not to say that Harsdorf is not a strong in-district fundraiser. She is. She just isn't the purist she claimed she was in the early months of the election. But she got a ton of great press beating up Clausing for her fundraising and ended up doing exactly what she was accusing Clausing of doing.

And it will be the same for Rep. Mark Green. He will close the fundraising gap quickly in the last month or so of the campaign and spend just as much as Governor Doyle.

But first he'll keep the feeding the press lines about how Doyle is going to outspend him by millions and help the press beat up Doyle for his out-of-state donations. Indeed he put out a press release late last month along those lines.

In the end, Green will spend as much, perhaps more, than Governor Doyle on the election and will have a lot of out-of-state donations come in during the last few weeks of the campaign.

And the press will have bought the whole ridiculous story like they always do.