The last pre-election round of campaign finance reports is in, not that anyone in the media noticed. To me, the single biggest note is that the Barons of Burlington and their allies are continuing to throw big money at John Rodgers, Republican candidate for lieutenant governor and alleged rural populist. In the first half of October, Rodgers raised $20,250; in the second half, he took in an extraordinary $69,259, almost erasing the cash advantage held by incumbent Prog/Dem David Zuckerman throughout the campaign. Not quite, but almost.

Of that $69,259, a full $58,199 was in increments of $1,000 or more.

That’s more than 83% of Rodgers’ total takings between October 16 and 31.

Son of the soil, my Aunt Fanny.

Here’s another way to slice the bologna. During the period, Rodgers took in a scant $2,560 in gifts of $100 or less. That’s a mere 3.7% of his total.

Which is S.O.P. for Rodgers’ campaign as a whole. He’s raised $212,443 so far, but only $8,809 in gifts of $100 or less. That’s only 4.1% of his total.

And apparently Rodgers expects to get even more big-money backing, because he has overspent his fundraising total by $23,534. He spent close to $100,000 in the last two weeks of October alone!

What did he spend it on? Well, there’s $28,500 for a joint TV ad buy with Gov. Phil Scott and close to $20,000 for radio ads touting the Scott-Rodgers ticket. The other major expenditures: $12,080 in robo-calls from the mysterious Illinois-based consultancy Don’t AFK LLC, $9,000 for the expert campaign advice of twice-failed Democratic candidate James Ehlers*, and $8,000 in online ads placed by St. Albans-based Driven Marketing.

*Ehlers has taken a total of $15,000 from the Rodgers campaign. Presumably his advice on attracting centrist and Democratic voters is ‘Don’t do what I did.”

Rodgers’ late- campaign donor list is studded with the bright lights and bulging wallets of the Barons and their fellow plutocrats, many of whom have added even more money to their previous largesse, including: People named Tarrant ($4,000 this period and $7,000 for the entire campaign); people named Pizzagalli ($3,000/6,000); Robert Lair, realtor and CEO of the Hula coworking space ($1,000/2,000); Russ Scully, “serial entrepreneur” and Lair’s partner in Hula ($1,000/2,000); Friend Of The Blog Bruce Lisman ($1,000/3,000); realtor Douglas Nedde ($1,000/3,000); Ray Pecor, former owner of Lake Champlain Ferries and the Vermont Lake Monsters ($1,000/3,000), and Bissonette Properties ($1,000/2,000). Also, Phil Scott for Vermont donated $2,500 cash on top of a previous $1,000, and that’s all in addition to the intangible value of all those joint advertisements.

The repeat donors were joined this time by a bunch of newcomers to Team Rodgers. Those giving more than $1,000 were Barre Mayor Thom Lauzon and wife Karen ($4,480), Lauzon’s business partner Fred Oeschger ($4,480), paving contractor Jeff Hutchins ($4,450), TGE Investments, a firm whose registered agent is Jerry Tarrant ($3,000), Kevin Camp, concrete manufacturer ($2,009), bowling entrepreneur Heather Provost ($2,000), Karl Weller, UVM lacrosse player turned corporate exec ($2,000), and developer Pierre Menard ($1,300).

New donors giving $1,000 apiece: Real estate development firm Town Meadow LLC, Brookside Apartments of Colchester, BPJS Management (a Bissonette firm), the Burlington-based Fleischer Investment Group, Altria Client Services (Virginia, presumably connected to the tobacco giant Altria), Wayne Lamberton, former top exec in Phil Scott’s former company DuBois Constrction, and last but not least, Friend Of The Blog Lenore Broughton.

By comparison, Zuckerman received only two gifts of more than $500 during the period: $1,000 from Everytown for Gun Safety and $1,000 from retired Air Force officer turned F-35 critic Rosanne Greco.

As I’ve noted previously, the Rodgers campaign got off to an extremely late start and was essentially nonexistent as of July 1. After that came the deluge of four-figure checks, a deluge that has yet to abate. Will that be enough to overcome Zuckerman’s superior name recognition and decades-long track record of winning elections? I doubt it. And if Big Money does manage to buy the lieutenant governorship, well, that’s nothing to brag about.