March FEC Report

Federal political candidates and organizations (including state political parties) are required to file monthly reports to the Federal Elections Commission.  The previously months reporting (in this case, March) is typically filed in the 3rd week of the month after (in this case, April 20).

A recent post from the AJC’s Political Insider Jim Galloway made the situation at the DPG look rosier than it really is.  Galloway wrote that the DPG has $149,095 in cash on hand, but the actual number is far lower.  The error is due to reliance on the state ethics reporting system, which counts not only the Democratic Party of Georgia but also the Georgia House Democratic Caucus and Georgia Senate Democratic Caucus.  For more accurate numbers, consult the Federal Elections Commission.

For the month of March the Democratic Party of Georgia raised $99,354.01 and spent $85,615.54.

For the year of 2012, the Democratic Party of Georgia has raised $248,854.97 and spent $247,217.61.

The DPG has $57,409.03 cash on hand with $35,109.40 in debt.  If you subtract the debt from the cash on hand, the DPG has expendable resources of $22,299.63 on hand.

On April 28, the Democratic Party of Georgia’s major fundraising event of the year happens, the Jefferson Jackson Dinner.  Some of those contributions are already reflected in the FEC reports.  However; the main problem for the DPG is that it’s running on a broken system.  The JJ Dinner used to bring in enough money to fund much of the DPG’s operating budget.  The 2008 JJ grossed around $800K.   The 2009 and 2010 JJ’s brought in gross amounts of slightly under $500K and the 2011 JJ’s gross took a free fall to just slightly over $300K, the worst performing JJ on record.  Sadly, estimates appear to say this year’s JJ could be another repeat of last years financial failure.

Lets hope for all of our sakes that JJ 2012 turns out better than recent estimates show, otherwise, the DPG may continue its downward trend.  Given what an important election year 2012 is and how much interest there is, we should have expected the 2012 Jefferson-Jackson dinner to bring in similar numbers to the 2008 JJ Dinner, thus in the $800K range.  At least lets hope the JJ recovers to 2009/2010 number and pulls down $500K, anything less than that would be a disaster and leave Georgia Democrats with a massively underfunded state party in a very critical election year.