OC Political

Chris Nguyen gave an excellent analysis yesterday of the 73rd Assembly District campaign finance reports. I figured that I wanted to contribute to the party by providing a similar analysis of the 2nd Supervisorial District. This analysis is going to show that Michelle Steel is in a commanding lead. She currently has more cash on hand than every candidate running for the 2nd Supervisorial District and 73rd Assembly District combined.

The biggest surprise from this race is Joe Carchio. It was announced by Carchio last week that he was running for the seat. I obviously don’t expect him to report any money raised for the period covering January 1st- June 30th 2013, but he hasn’t even opened a committee yet.

Michelle Steel got the early lead on this race being the first to announce her candidacy. Her fundraising totals are quite impressive with just under $450,000 (includes transfers) in actual direct contributions arriving during this reporting period. That is an impressive number for any campaign, especially a Supervisorial campaign. I must admit that I was surprised that she doesn’t appear to have a campaign website up and running yet.

It is still really early in the race and Allan Mansoor is still only exploring a run for Supervisor, but his numbers are not super impressive. $8,400 (includes transfers) raised is not going to get the job done. He might have a name ID advantage going into the race but he cannot have a repeat performance of what happened in 2012 (getting massively outspent) against Michelle Steel. If he steps up his fundraising this election I can see him putting together some impressive fundraising numbers from some local grassroots organizations. At this point though it may be too late.

Jim Moreno raised the second most at $12,785 and did not have to transfer anything over from his College Board Account. This number is not great compared to Steel but I will give him credit for raising more than Mansoor. It will be interesting to see what he raises for this campaign as I do consider him a bit of a wild card candidate to make it to the run-off.

One of the more interesting statistics that I noticed from the reports are the lack of expenditures. Generally, candidates end up spending a lot of money up front, but that is not the case in this race with Steel leading the pack on spending at a whopping $6,593. I have a feeling that spending will go dramatically up during the next reporting period for all of the candidates.

Here is the breakdown:

Campaign finance reports for January 1-June 30, 2013 were due at 11:59 PM last night.

In order to provide the complete story, it must be noted that Michelle Steel did transfer money from her Board of Equalization account and Allan Mansoor transferred money from his Assembly account. Here is a chart to showing the breakdown of how much was raised and how much was transferred:

Ladies and gentlemen this race is very one sided as of today. Michelle Steel has over 25 times as much money as all three of the other opponents COMBINED! I admit that Allan Mansoor has a name ID advantage going into the race and he did beat Leslie Daigle in 2012 despite being massively outspent, but if he doesn’t step up these numbers his chances of getting elected are very unlikely.