As happy as I am for Senator McCaskill, and as much as I believe in her ability to work with the U.S. Senate and related political forces to more effectively manage our country, I wish we could have spent this campaign money (from both sides) on actual problems. I guess the question is: what problems, first?
From CQPolitics.com:
- But if you account for the coordinated and independent spending from the political parties, the most expensive Senate race was not in Pennsylvania but in Missouri, where Democratic state Auditor Claire McCaskill narrowly defeated Republican Sen. Jim Talent.
In that contest, the cumulative spending by the candidates and the parties came to $47.2 million, or just ahead of Pennsylvania’s $46.5 million. Missouri’s edge over Pennsylvania is even more lopsided on a per-capita basis because it has less than half the population of Pennsylvania.
In Missouri, the political parties reported $19.8 million in independent expenditures — of which $10 million was spent in support of Talent or in opposition to McCaskill, and $9.8 million was spent in support of McCaskill or in opposition to Talent. The two parties also nearly evenly divided $1.4 million in coordinated expenditures that they made in concert with McCaskill and Talent.
The $19.8 million in party independent expenditures in Missouri was not far off the $26 million that McCaskill and Talent spent from their own campaign accounts.
- "FEC Highlights Spending Data on 2006 Senate Races" (CQPolitics.com, 9 Mar 2007)
posted by samir @ 13:10
