“Our fundraising is pretty steady — it goes along at about a million dollars a quarter, and I expect that to continue in the next few quarters,” Castle told CQ Politics.
Well, I guess $826,000 is “about a million dollars a quarter.” But if there is one thing you don’t do in politics is throw precise words around when you really want some wiggle spin ready room. You don’t throw out the term “million dollars” if you do not expect to raise more than a million dollars. Like in Star Trek, when Engineer Montgomery Scott always multiplied his repair time estimates by a factor of four, so that he would be a miracle worker in Captain Kirk’s eyes. In political fundraising, you want to lowball your expectations so it is a story of success when your numbers are released. Here, you can argue that Castle failed to meet his own fundraising expectations. And if there is one thing in politics you don’t do is fail to meet your own self imposed expectations.
Now, $826,000 is an impressive figure by itself, out of context. But when you consider that Castle had over an extra month to fundraise this quarter over Coons (since Coons did not file his candidacy papers until February 2 or thereabouts), he only managed to outraise Coons by $191,000 in that extra time. Coons raised $635,000 from February 2 until March 30. If you average that haul over three months, as if Coons had filed his FEC papers on January 1, he would have raised $952,500, far closer to that “about a million dollars” benchmark, and more than Castle. Imagine those headlines.
If only Beau Biden had not waited from Thanksgiving until late January to announce his decision not to run.
Still, in that context, this is a very competitive money race.