The Fighting 29th

All about New York's 29th Congressional District

Precious little is happening in the 29th during the holidays.

In the euphemism watch department, Randy Kuhl was one of the signatories of a bi-partisan letter to Eliot Spitzer, urging him to support a "woody biomass" power generation plant near Ellicottville. "Woody biomass" is the shiny new name given to trees and branches: apparently "Utilizing Woody Biomass" sounds a lot more high-tech than "burning wood". According to a GAO report [pdf], it is cleaner than coal, but more labor-intensive and harder to obtain.

In the pork watch department, Kuhl announced still more Homeland Security grants to local fire departments.

Today's front-page story in the Washington Post details the funding mess left by the 109th Congress. The Republican's last spending authorization bill left just enough money for the government to run until Februrary, and only 2 of the 11 necessary appropriation bills were passed. Along with the Republican inaction, the Democrats' cancellation of earmarks will also leave a few useful programs without money in 2007.

Eric Massa and Rochesterturning have both written about this earlier, focusing on the cowardice and irresponsibility of the Republicans. While that's certainly the most important angle of the story, the Post coverage also shows why it's so hard to be a reformer in Washington. When Nancy Pelosi and Charles Rangel cut earmarks, they also cut $3 million for AIDS and homelessness in Pelosi's district, as well as $3 mil for the "Charles Rangel Center for Public Service" at CCNY. While we all might be able to do without the latter, the former is probably going to hurt a group of needy people. In both Pelosi's and Rangel's case, reform means taking a hit with constituents, something that's anathema to Members of Congress.

Reader Rich writes to remind us that the documentary "Taking the Hill", which followed five veteran/candidates, including Eric Massa, airs tonight from 9-11 on the Discovery Times channel. On Time/Warner Cable, this is channel 512. Discovery Times (not Discovery) is also available on satellite services. You can watch a preview here.

To understand the accomplishment reflected in the final money numbers, let's compare the 29th to the other close races in New York. These are races where an incumbent was defending his office, and the margin of victory (or loss) was in single digits. In both fundraising and spending, Eric Massa outdid his peers. Not only was Massa the only challenger to out-raise and out-spend his opponent, the others weren't even close.

The chart at the right illustrates the fundraising achievements of the group. The bars show the difference in spending between the incumbent and the opponent. For example, in NY-26, Tom Reynolds' whopping $4.2 million represented 64% of the $6.6 million raised in that race. Jack Davis' $2.4 million, most of which came from his own pocket, is only 36% of the total. The graph shows the difference: Reynolds out-raised Davis by 28%.

The line on the chart shows the Cook Political Report Partisan Voter Index. For example, NY-25 is D+3, which means that the district is on average 3% more Democratic than the nation as a whole. As you can see, at R+5 (D-5), the 29th is the toughest district of the group.

The spending story is similar. This graph shows the gap in spending between the two contestants in each race. As with Friday's post, I added third-party spending to the mix. Again, the incumbents far outspent challengers in all races except in the 29th. NY-20 was the next closest, where Sweeney and his allies outspent Gillibrand by 12%. As with the previous chart, the red line represents the Cook Partisan Voter Index for the race.

All of the challengers in this study were well-funded, and some raised and spent far more than Massa. In absolute terms, Davis, Gillibrand and Hall (NY-20) out-raised and outspent Massa, but each of those challengers participated in races where the "cost of admission" was much higher. Massa was the only challenger who paid more that the cost of admission, and the race in the 29th was close because of it.

The underlying data for this study is available as a pdf.

The FEC has released the final money numbers for the 29th. Eric Massa out-raised and out-spent Randy Kuhl by small margins. When third-party contributions are added to the mix, Massa and MoveOn.org outspent the Kuhl campaign by almost $200K.

The graph at the right shows the contributor mix for the campaign. Massa raised a little over $1 million from individual contributors. Kuhl's largest contributors were Political Action Committees, and he raised almost $1 million from them. The "other" category in this graph represents contributions from party and also from the candidate. Massa contributed $41K to this campaign, and loaned it another $56K, which has since been repaid.

For the spending picture, I lumped third-party expenditures with candidate expenditures. The main third-party expenditure was the $139K spent by MoveOn.org to attack Randy Kuhl. I show that as an expenditure for Massa, though technically MoveOn is a third party.

I'll post later on the significance of these numbers, since it's not often that a challenger out-raises and out-spends an opponent in a race like this, especially in a supposedly "red" district. Keep in mind one important point when interpreting the charts: Massa ran a two-year campaign, since he declared his candidacy in November, 2004. So even though he did out-spend Kuhl, he did so over two years. Kuhl didn't being to spend seriously on his campaign until Summer, 2006.