Republican candidate Bob Ehrlich exceeded his $3 million fundraising goal and nearly tied Gov. Martin O’Malley’s reported $3.3 million in donations for the eight-month period ending in August, Ehrlich insiders told The Washington Examiner on Thursday.
The Republican plans to announce fundraising totals — which are hovering just under $3.3 million — on Friday.
Ehrlich’s campaign celebrated the better-than-expected totals as a major victory for the former governor, but he still lags O’Malley, who reported a total $6.7 million in his war chest.
“Everyone in the [Ehrlich campaign] office was going crazy when they saw O’Malley’s numbers,” said an Ehrlich staffer, who told The Examiner he wished to remain anonymous because Ehrlich’s fundraising totals were not made public.
Ehrlich’s supporters are focusing on O’Malley’s fundraising since January and calling the last eight months a near tie, a second staffer told The Examiner.
O’Malley reported $5.7 million in the January fundraising report — at which point Ehrlich, who had not announced his run for office, had $151,529 in the bank.
“Ehrlich has raised $3 million in a little bit of time and O’Malley has been working on it for four years now,” said former Montgomery County Councilwoman Nancy Dacek, a Republican who now serves on the county’s Board of Elections. “I think that’s a big help for [Ehrlich] in this election.”
O’Malley was not allowed to campaign during the legislative session that ended in April — giving his Republican challenger a four-month advantage, O’Malley campaign spokesman Tom Russell said.
Still, “O’Malley still has a large financial lead,” noted Paul Hernnson, director of the nonpartisan Center for American Politics and Citizenship at the University of Maryland. O’Malley also has more party followers in Maryland, where Democrats outnumber Republicans two-to-one. “From that point of view, it’s Ehrlich’s race to lose,” Hernnson said.
More money means more resources for expensive TV ads, radio ads and voter mobilization.
But some say the size of a candidate’s war chest makes no difference to voters — including Jerry Pasternak, a Democrat who served 12 years as senior political and policy adviser to former Montgomery County Executive Doug Duncan.
“The money raising in a campaign for governor is a sideshow,” he said. “It will be irrelevant to whether people will vote one way or the other. All this does is tell people Bob Ehrlich is in the race for real.”
