Category Archives: Campaign finance

A rare bit o’ sunshine falls on Scott Milne’s shoulder

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I have to admit, I didn’t think he had it in him. But Scott Milne did it: he actually had a solid fundraising effort in September.

It’s too little, too late to get him elected. But it’s a nice solid turnaround.

Mahatma’s October 1 campaign finance report shows that he raised $78,529 during September, plus $2,600 in “in-kind” contributions, for a total of $81,129.

Very respectable. And roughly double his fundraising total before September 1.

But wait, there’s more good news. As many Republicans were quick to point out, the vast majority of Milne’s money came from in-state donors. He also did extremely well with small donations, racking up 348 separate gifts of less than $100 each. He had a lot of donations in the $100-500 range, and relatively few top-dollar gifts. His total number of unique donors in September was almost 450, or abut 15 per day. Not bad at all.

There were a couple worms in the apple, of course. He’s spending money faster than he’s raising it, having laid out more than $95,000 in all. Which leaves him with a net balance of about $41,000. In terms of cash on hand, Governor Shumlin has a 26-to-1 advantage. It’s still Bambi vs. Godzilla.

Also, more than $38,000 of Milne’s fundraising came from himself or his immediate family. And he had earlier loaned his campaign a cool $25,000. Overall, he’s much better off than he was a month ago, but he’s nowhere near competitive financially.

My conclusion: This was a good month for Milne, but it’s inconsequential to the Shumlin machine. The person for whom this is really bad news is Dan Feliciano, the Libertarian candidate who’s hoping to steal a sizeable chunk of the Republican vote. Feliciano continued to fundraise in dribs and drabs, pulling in only about $3,500 last month.

Milne beat him handily. What that says to me is that, among Republican voters, the GOP brand still carries a lot of cachet. They will vote for the Republican candidate no matter what. And quite a few of them will give money to the Republican candidate no matter what.

It makes me think that Feliciano’s upside may be more limited than us politi-geeks had thought. We heard the insider buzz for Feliciano, and party apparatchiks’ palpable disdain for Milne, and projected Feliciano to take a decent chunk of conservative votes — perhaps driving him into the teens, percentage-wise. Milne’s latest finance report makes me think the Feliciano buzz is mostly confined to the insider crowd, and that the Republican grassroots are likely to stick with their party’s man — even if (especially if?) they don’t know who he is.

Which makes me think that Feliciano won’t get out of the single digits. Sure, he got into the teens in the August primary as a write-in candidate, but that was a very small, self-selected sliver of the broader electorate. He’ll have a very hard time matching that performance in November.

(Note: If Feliciano’s seemingly ill-considered 48-hour, $100,000 fundraising blitz actually succeeds, I’ll have to eat a bunch of my words. And I’d be happy to do so. But I’m not getting out the ketchup bottle just yet.)

Dick-swinging time

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Apologies for the crass title, but it seems singularly appropriate for the early returns on this campaign finance deadline day. Particularly when it comes to Governor Peter Shumlin and, to a lesser extent, Lieutenant Governor Phil Scott.

Shumlin maintained his frenzied fundraising pace during September, and his campaign spending went straight through the roof. He raised a total of $100,875 during the month — three thousand dollars a day, including weekends and Labor Day — which is insane enough, but then you get to the Expenditures line:

$234,898.90.

Congratulations, Governor, for holding the line under $235,000.

The lion’s share of that money went to TV advertising: $215,147.

I recall Scott Milne castigating the Governor for spending $20,000 a week on TV ads. Well, Mahatma was wrong: Shumlin spent twice as much. More than $40,000 a week. Yikes. 

Later Note: That was a mental leap too far. Shumlin’s campaign spent $215,147 on TV in September, but some of that money — perhaps most of it — may have been prepaid for ad time in the coming weeks. So I can’t say how much Shumlin is spending per week. 

At this time two years ago, Shumlin hadn’t even begun to advertise. And he faced a stronger opponent — well, a less sickly opponent, anyway. As of October 15, 2012 (there wasn’t an October 1 report that year), he had spent a total of $160,387. For his entire campaign.

He spent more than that on TV ads alone. In the past month alone.

And he’s got enough cash on hand to keep up the pace through Election Day even if he doesn’t raise another dime, which, ha ha. His campaign fund has a positive balance of just over $400,000. Add in the money left over from his Hulk-Smash victory over Randy Brock in 2012, he’s got more than a million bucks in the bank.

Scott Milne, who hadn’t filed as of 2:30 pm, has told VPR’s Peter Hirschfeld that he’d raised over $80,000 in the past month. Which is impressive by his standards, but still nothing compared to Shumlin’s stash.

Libertarian Dan Feliciano, as I reported earlier today, raised about $3500 in the past month and $17,000 for the entire campaign. And his bottom line is actually underwater. Or it would be if he hadn’t donated $10,000 to his own campaign.

Money-wise, the Governor has nothing to worry about. So, given the fact that his challengers are woefully underfunded and undertalented, why is he spending like a drunken sailor in a state liquor store?

My theory is that he really, really wants to get a pure majority of the vote. And hopefully approach the 57% he received two years ago. If he wins with a mere plurality against puny competition, he’ll enter the big push for single-payer health care a diminished political figure. He doesn’t want that. So expect to keep on seeing plenty of Shumlin for Governor ads on your TV screen.

Phil Scott’s package is nothing like Shumlin’s, but he’s doing just fine by the standards of the Lieutanant Governorship. He did crack the $200,000 mark in total donations, which was his stated goal — to raise as much money the traditional way as Prog/Dem Dean Corren would receive in public financing. And Scott still has more time to raise more money.

And more space, too. He’s getting plenty of money from business groups and PACs, but he’s getting a goodly share of smaller donations as well. Uniquely among Vermont Republicans, Phil Scott actually has something of a base.

He’ll need to keep fundraising if he wants to maintain his spending pace. He’s managed to spend over $150,000 so far. He did enter this cycle with over $42,000 left over from 2012, so he’s up around $100K in cash on hand. But if he’s spent $150K so far, he’s likely to spend a lot more by November 4. The Governor won’t break any campaign spending records, which were set in 2010’s Shumlin/Dubie contest. But Phil Scott must be shattering the previous campaign spending marks for his office. His ceremonial office.

If only he had time left over for his alleged VTGOP-rebuilding project.

This should go well.

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Hey, what’s this on my Twitter feed?

Now, there’s big news. Dan the Libertarian Man wants to raise $100,000 in two days.

Ahem. As it happens, today is campaign finance filing day, and Dan — being the efficiency maven that he is — filed his report early. And it says here that in the past month, he’s raised a massive $3,528. Which brings his campaign total to $17,014.

So… in 48 hours, he’s going to beat his total for the entire campaign by a factor of six.

Yeah, let me know how that goes for ya.

Unless he’s got a whole buncha Sugar Daddies waiting in the weeds, he won’t raise 100 G’s or anything like it. But with a bit of luck, he might raise enough to get his campaign out of debt. Expenditures to date: $28,505.59. He’s only been able to pay the bills and keep the lights on because he donated $10,000 to his own campaign.

So much for #Felicianomentum. If a grassroots movement is afoot, it sure doesn’t show up in his finances. In the past month he received a mere 15 donations, or roughly one every two days. Seven were less than $100 apiece. Of the other eight, six came from outside of Vermont. And for the campaign to date, only 32 people have opened their wallets on Dan’s behalf. For those unfamiliar with campaign finance, let’s just say those are really small numbers.

In his situation, any little boost he can get from this fundraising blitz will help. But he’s certain to fall embarrassingly short of his extremely large goal. (Again, unless he’s got a lot of Ayn Rand fans on his “In Case Of Campaign Emergency, Break Glass” list.) Why not aim for $20,000? He might possibly, maybe, achieve that. Or get close enough to plausibly declare victory.

The short answer is, he needs $100,000 to build #Felicianomentum toward Election Day. But no matter how much he actually raises, it’s going to look small compared to his stated goal.

Oh well, I wish him luck.

p.s. The Grammar Lady in me can’t resist noting that “& etc” is redundant. Use your characters wisely, Dan; you only get 140 at a time. 

Mahatma’s meltdown

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Scott Milne, the man who famously called himself “Gandhi-like,” is finding that it’s awfully hard being a pacifist when the bullets are flying. He made an unplanned call to WDEV’s Mark Johnson Show on Friday morning and… well… spent about 20 minutes ranting about the media’s unfair treatment of the Milne campaign. And specifically impugning the good name of Our State Pundit Laureate, Eric Davis. That will never do, Mr. Milne.

Davis had been a guest during the first hour of the program. He and Johnson discussed the gubernatorial race. The consensus was that Governor Shumlin had left himself vulnerable because of various scandals and issues. And that it’s too bad the Republicans didn’t have a better candidate, because Scott Milne had made a mess of things.

Apparently it was enough to make even a Gandhi-like person’s blood boil. A little while later in the show, Milne called in to rebut Davis’ analysis. Or to slap it around, anyway. At great length and in pretty extreme terms: at one point, he accused Davis of “laughing at me.” Sorry, Mahatma, I don’t think I’ve ever heard Eric Davis laugh at anyone. If he’s anything, he’s a straight arrow, cautious to a fault.

Here’s a sample of Mahatma’s Meltdown:

When you’re bringing people on the air that influence people with, ah, you know, tenured professorships from elite institutions, you need to ask the tough questions and bring out the contradictions in what they said. If you look back on Mr. Davis’ track record of picking things in Vermont over the last few elections, it’s not stellar. And I think it’s a form of, uh, you know, uh, you know, journalistic malpractice. You just let him get away with saying some of those things.

I’m sure the folks at Middlebury College are happy to be considered an “elite institution,” but otherwise, good God. Eric Davis’ track record hasn’t been perfect, but it’s been awfully good. That’s why he’s the go-to political analyst for Vermont media. He knows his stuff, he’s conscientious, he doesn’t take chances, and he certainly doesn’t engage in gratuitous attacks. He has earned the respect he is given by the media and by news consumers.

Milne railed against the notion that his campaign lacks ideas. Which isn’t accurate; what we say is that he lacks policy positions and proposals. Milne’s definition of “idea” includes such things as “Peter Shumlin spends too much time out of state” and “the economy isn’t growing quickly enough.” What Milne is criticized for is his real, true, honest-to-God lack of proposals. He tries to make this a virtue by saying, on issue after issue, that he’s going to get all parties together and work out the best solution.

That’s awfully thin gruel. And besides, his current definition of ideas is at odds with what he was saying earlier on: that he would spend August attacking Shumlin, and start rolling out his own proposals in September. He hasn’t delivered on Part 2. “Give me 30 days,” he said on July 25. It’s been 50 days since then.

Milne also repeated one of the more extraordinary statements he’s made during the campaign:

I am uncomfortable about calling people and asking them for money to support a public policy campaign, and feeling 100% like I don’t owe them something afterwards.

I guess you could say that has a certain freakish nobility. But it’s a fantasy: Politicians have to raise money. Yes, there’s too much money in politics. But Milne has raised a laughably small amount — and virtually all of it from his family, friends, and his own back pocket.

Now we know why. He doesn’t want to ask for money, and he doesn’t want to be obligated.

Somebody should. tell Phil Scott about this. He’s been raising money right and left from contractors and gas companies and rich Vermonters and his vast network of cronies, and insisting that it doesn’t make any difference in his politics. Scott Milne would beg to differ.

Somebody should also tell the Scott Milne of midsummer about this. At the time, he said he planned to raise and spend about $200,000, which would be enough to wage an “unconventional campaign.” As of early September, he’d raised about 20% of that total. And since then, his full-time professional campaign manager has resigned. And we haven’t seen any TV ads or mailings or yard signs or any other tangible measures of an adequately resourced organization.

Milne was upset Eric Davis’ characterization of his campaign as “running on fumes.” He said, “If [Davis] hasn’t talked to my bank, he has no way of saying that.” And he pointed to his paid staff of five people as evidence he had money.

And then he contradicted himself.

We’ve got a strategy. Granted, it’s not perfect. I’m going to make mistakes. But I think our strategy is, you know, we’re running an insurgent campaign. We’re going to use our lack of money as best we can as an asset.

“Our lack of money.” Yep, he said it.

And about this “insurgent campaign” stuff. Yes, Milne is running an unconventional campaign. And yes, Eric Davis and Mark Johnson and me and all the rest of the punditocracy are basing our judgments on political convention: you have to take time to build name recognition, you have to generate news coverage, you have to have a robust infrastructure from the central office to the grassroots, you have to have a decent amount of money to run advertisements and do mailings and staff phone banks and print signs and all that other stuff of retail politics. You have to have ideas and positions that give people positive reasons to vote for you. You need a certain capacity for public speaking and pressing the flesh and handling the media.

And, preferably, you need a track record of accomplishment in the public sector.

Scott Milne has none of that. And he’s made a bunch of obvious blunders.

And so, when measured against every available standard for judging a campaign, Milne comes up short.

Now, if his “insurgent campaign” taps into a vast unseen reservoir of support, then all us conventional thinkers will get our asses kicked on November 4.

And I, for one, will be more than willing to admit I was wrong.

But I am extremely confident that I’m not wrong.

Of course, if Milne loses it’ll be Eric Davis’ fault.

What I need are people who want change and balance in Montpelier, to be naive enough to believe that they can make a difference by voting. And having people like Eric Davis that don’t think that, there’s a  lot of that, but somebody like you giving him a microphone week after week, when he’s got a track record he has of saying things that are factually inaccurate, I believe he purports an awful lot of opinions like they’re facts and you let him get away with it, and I don’t think that’s fair.

He went off the rails in mid-sentence there, but his point was that Eric Davis’ negativity was going to keep him from building momentum, and cause him to lose the election.

Sigh.

Like I’ve said before, pundits and reporters and even little old partisan bloggers like me simply don’t have that kind of influence. The vast majority of voters have already made up their minds. And the rest of ’em won’t spend the next seven weeks poring over media coverage of the campaign. The crowd of political junkies who pay a lot of attention to this stuff is a very small crowd indeed.

No, Mahatma, Eric Davis won’t kill your insurgency by the power of his punditry. Peter Shumlin will kill it with his superior organization, warchest, and advantages of incumbency. The Vermont Republican Party will kill it with its nonexistent grassroots organization, lack of resources, and internal divisions. The voters will kill it because a solid majority of them are liberal or progressive, and the Democrats have a built-in advantage.

And Scott Milne will kill it with his lack of political experience and smarts, and his poor performance on the public stage.

By all conventional measures, Scott Milne has run a terrible campaign. And I’m a guy who, when Milne first came on the scene, had some hope that he’d turn out to be a solid representative of moderate Republicanism. If he were doing a good job, I’d be reporting as such. But he’s not.

Shorter Feliciano: Money is Bad, when it’s not mine

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One of the lesser pieces of flotsam to hit the beach after Governor Shumlin’s first campaign commercial went on the air was a written statement from Libertarian candidate Dan Feliciano. (I guess Scott Milne was too busy doing… something… to issue a stattement, so Feliciano seized the token-response space.)

And here it is, in all its hypocritical glory:

The reality is Governor Shumlin’s failed leadership is what is hurting Vermonters, but Peter Shumlin will reach into his million dollar war chest and run endless ads spinning a false narrative and trying to convince hard working Vermonters that his big Government programs are the solutions to their problems.

Oh, that’s rich. Dan Feliciano thinks that the Governor will use his big honkin’ bankroll to pull the wool over Vermonters’ eyes.

This, from a guy who believes that money is speech, and there should be no limits on campaign contributions. Stop it, Dan: you’re embarrassing yourself and undermining your own principles.

Your own narrative of the political process should lead you to congratulate the Governor for going out, working hard, and convincing people to give money to his campaign. It’s the American Dream, right?

Reminds me of a time a few years back when I was listening to professional Liberty Puppet Rob Roper flappin’ his gums on WDEV Radio. He was complaining about the imbalance in Vermont’s nonprofit community — that those on the left were far stronger and deeper-pocketed than those on the right. The Robster, at the time, was fronting his own struggling nonprofit, so you might say he had a conflict of interest. But I certainly never heard him complain about the vast Koch Brothers nonprofit network. Nor will he complain about the Kochs’ money underwriting his current gig at the Ethan Allen Institute.

But in the case of Vermont nonprofits, as with gubernatorial warchests, the shoe’s on the wrong foot for our doughty, independent Vermont conservatives. To put it another way, it’s not fair when liberals have the money.

Phil Scott finally finds a cause

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Our Lieutenant Governor is known as a go-along, get-along guy, reluctant to take strong stands on anything, A True Friend To All. Never once has he appeared to get all hot and bothered about any political issue or event. 

Until now. Drum roll, please… 

Phil Scott’s great cause is… Saving Phil Scott’s Bacon!

Seriously, take a gander at his latest campaign finance filing. Since August 18, a period of less than three weeks including a long holiday weekend, Scott fundraised like a madman. He pulled in almost $49,000 in that brief time. That brings him to $162,000 raised during a campaign in which his stated goal was to match Dean Corren’s $200,000 in public financing. 

Y’know, I think ol’ Phil’s gonna make it. 

When Corren qualified for public financing, Phil Scott faced his first-ever challenger who could go toe-to-toe with him financially. He’s responded to the challenge with all the fervor of a politician who has looked political death in the eye. 

Of course, there’s a price to be paid for all this success: nobody’s giving any money to any other Republican. And Phil Scott sure as hell ain’t sharing his wealth. Compare Scott’s bank account to Scott Milne’s, now in negative territory, or the state GOP’s — the party raised a mere $1,000 during the same period when Phil Scott took in $49K. 

From which I conclude two things. First, Phil Scott’s put his party-building project on hold until his own ass is safely re-elected. And second, every deep-pocketed Republican donor has done the electoral math and concluded that Phil Scott, and only Phil Scott, is a worthwhile investment in 2014. The entire Republican project has come down to this: Save Phil Scott!

And they probably will. But it’s still pathetic. 

The Milne Insufficiency

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Several days ago, I wrote a highlight-reel glance at this month’s campaign finance reports. Scott Milne’s meager report was mentioned; $22,370 for the past month, and $42,790 for the entire campaign.

That’s bad enough, but when you look more closely, things are… you guessed it… even worse. Milne’s fundraising effort, as unsuccessful as it’s been, is highly dependent on a handful of out-of-state donors who’ve already given the legal maximum of $2,000. Those top-dollar gifts account for $32,000 of Milne’s total. His in-state fundraising is nearly nonexistent, and he hasn’t roused any significant support among the Common Folk.

In my deadline-day post, I noted that $16,000 of Milne’s $42K was thanks to his connection to the Boies family, whose paterfamilias, David Boies, is a high-powered Washington attorney. His son, David Boies III, was a college roommate of Milne’s and is currently his business partner in a real estate development firm.

I was wrong. Let’s make that $20,000 in Boies-related cash. Two of the $2,000 donors on Milne’s reports are Timothy Battin and Rebecca Anderson. They are married, or at least an established couple, and he is a partner in daddy Boies’ law firm.

For those keeping score, that’s almost half of all Milne’s money coming from his Boies connection.

It might be even more. There are some common surnames on Milne’s max-money list, and those are tough to pin down via The Google. Any could have an undiscovered Boies tie. They include: John S. Edwards III and Mark Williams of California and Mark Sutton of Arizona. There’s also a New Jersey corporation, AJI, LLC, which I couldn’t positively identify.

But here’s something about Sutton. He is owner of Meridian Engineering, which also gave $2,000 to Milne for Governor. And here’s a possibly unrelated note from a recent Milne profile by The Freeploid’s Terri Hallenbeck:

He was living in Arizona in 1987, working as a field engineer for an electronics firm and starting a family, when his parents talked him into returning to Vermont and buying part of their travel agency.

So 18 years ago Milne was working “as a field engineer” in Arizona and now he’s pulled in $4,000 from a guy who owns an engineering firm in Arizona. That’s a stretch, but it makes more sense than “Some random dude gave Scott Milne four G’s.”

There’s reason to believe that Milne has received as much as three-quarters of his money from his well-tended Rolodex. He certainly hasn’t scored in his own home state; he’s raised roughly $10,000 from Vermonters. That’d be a nice total for a State Senate candidate, but it’s downright pathetic for a major-party gubernatorial hopeful. It’s surprising – shocking – to me that he hasn’t done better in-state. Even as a political outsider, an established businessman should have a lot of friends and associates who could be counted on to open their checkbooks. But no, not at all. And it seems obvious that the Republican establishment is giving him the cold shoulder.

As for Milne’s appeal to The Little Guy, he has raised a paltry $1,060 in gifts of under $100 from a whopping total of 24 separate donors. Not exactly evidence of a groundswell-in-the-making.

Maybe this is all part of His Big Plan, as Milne continues to insist. Maybe he turned to his old pals and partners to jumpstart his campaign, and now he’s cranking up the engine on his in-state machine.

Maybe. But I doubt it. And if that is, indeed, his plan, then it’s far too little and way too late.

 

That and a buck will buy you a gubernatorial campaign

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Scott Milne’s unconventional campaign for governor continues to be a rousing success.

Well, it does if being unconventional is your goal. Otherwise, not so much. In fact, the time has come for one of my Bold Predictions: the Milne candidacy is a Dead Man Walking. He’ll (probably) survive the primary, but not only will he lose to Governor Shumlin, he’ll lose in a landslide of epic proportions.

I’d feel sorry for a guy who volunteered to take one for the team that couldn’t find a candidate of its own, and a guy who lost his mother and business partner in mid-campaign. But he’s done himself no favors. He’s been surprisingly inarticulate with the media and singularly unappealing in person. He’s shedding potential supporters at an alarming rate, and he’s had virtually no success at in-state fundraising.

Milne’s decision to pull out of a debate sponsored by the Essex Republicans had one predictable effect: it pissed off the Essex Republicans who, per VTDigger, voted 97% for Libertarian Dan Feliciano in a straw poll.

Not that I’m buying into the low-level media narrative of a Feliciano groundswell; he’s not going to win the Republican primary, simply because it’s so hard for a write-in to beat someone whose name is on the ballot. And when VTDigger bruited the notion that “Feliciano has started to gain traction among [VTGOP] stalwarts,” the only names it could name were Darcie “Hack” Johnston and El Jefe General John McClaughry. That’s a start, I guess, but not a very impressive one. Johnston’s a proven loser with no electoral appeal, and McClaughry’s a crank. A personable fellow, but a crank.

But I can see why the narrative exists; Milne’s making such a dog’s breakfast of his campaign that, if not for Feliciano, there’d be precious little to report. But it’s not that Feliciano is surging; it’s that Milne continues to diminish like the tide at Fundy, leaving a thin film of sludge on the beach behind him.

But tonight’s the beginning of Milne’s second life: a “tele-town hall,” in which some number of Vermonters will presumably give up 90 minutes of their time to hear a brief address by Milne and maybe, possibly ask a question – if they pass muster with the event’s moderator, Milne’s two children. Cozy!

The event was preceded by a mass robo-call to 30,000 households inviting their participation. Event and robo-call presumably arranged by the good folks at Colorado-based Telephone TownHall Meeting, “Maximizing Results With Personalized Services” according to its website. Those services include tele-town halls and the preceding robo-calls, as they cheerfully describe:

As with our teletownhalls, we manage the details so you don’t have to. From script-writing to execution – TTHM produces a quality voice broadcast every time.  We edit your robocall audio for quality & clarity, and will even make the recording for you if you prefer.

No muss, no fuss. Which befits the off-the-rack style of the Milne effort. As the saying goes, there’s fast, cheap, and good. You can have any two you want, but you can’t get all three. Well, the Milne campaign has opted for fast and cheap. In addition to the prefab Town Hall, there’s the candidate’s first TV ad – consisting entirely of footage from his campaign launch event at Barre’s Aldrich Public Library.

The ready-madeness of the effort is understandable, considering the meager resources at campaign manager Brent Burns’ disposal. (Resources made even more meager once Burns pays himself his own consulting fees.) But not exactly the way to build a mass movement in a matter of months.

Money doesn’t buy everything, it’s true; and Milne supporters keep pointing to the stunning loss by Eric Cantor as proof. But Cantor was both rich and clueless, which Governor Shumlin is not; and Cantor’s opponent tapped into an existing reservoir of appeal, which Milne doesn’t have. And by appearances, he wouldn’t know how to tap if he had the chance.

So, done. Over. Finito.

Again, I feel bad for saying so; Scott Milne is a good businessman who’s grown his family business in tough times. But he’s turned out to be an appalling politician. I would have expected somewhat better, even for a near-novice, because he’s done well in a service profession. He must have some ability to communicate. But he hasn’t shown it since he entered politics.

And time, never his ally to begin with, has run out.

Yes, it got worse for Vermont Republicans. Except Phil.

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Notes and musings from the August 18 campaign finance report filings…

— Governor Shumlin is in cruise control. His campaign raised another $67,000 this time, and spent only $11,000. He has almost $1.13 million in the bank.

— Scott Milne continues to falter. He raised $22,370 this time, compared to $20,000 last time. That pace won’t get him anywhere near his stated goal of $200,000. And his total was again buoyed considerably by the Boies family: $2K from a Christopher Boies, $2K from daddy Boies’ law firm, and $2K from an LLC whose address is the same as the daddy Boies law firm. For those keeping track, the collective Boieses have donated $16,000 of Milne’s total of $42K. He also raised $2K from Altour International, a high-end travel agency based in New York. His biggest in-state donor was the Wayside Restaurant, which donated $2K. That’s a lot of ham and eggs.

Milne spent $28,000 in the past month, of which more than $18K went to campaign manager Brent Burns’ consulting firm.

— The alleged Republican upstart, Libertarian Dan Feliciano, reported raising $13,000. Sounds decent, but $10K of that came from Dan himself. He had only a handful of other donors — notably getting $200 from Republican Treasurer Mark “Little Snell” Snelling. There’s no sign of a Feliciano bandwagon to be found in his finance report.

— The Vermont Republican Party is still in the doldrums, raising $2,420 in the past month.

— The only Republican doing really well is Lieutenant Governor Phil Scott who, challenged by Progressive Dean Corren’s public financing, put his fundraising operation into high gear and pulled in $52,000 in the past month. He didn’t spend a whole lot, and has $120,000 in cash on hand. He got plenty of cash from construction firms (his line of work) and from some of his turncoat friends in the Senate Democratic majority — a total of $2500 from Dick and Dorothy Mazza, and $200 from “Bobby Star,” who I believe is actually State Sen. Bobby Starr.

Scott’s doing well for himself, but to judge from the latest reports, he ain’t lifting a finger for his beloved VTGOP.

— Vermonters First, which spent a million Broughton Bucks in 2012, is still in hibernation. Raised zero, spent $25 for a bank account.

— Lenore Broughton did open her checkbook for a few Republican candidates and gave $2K to the Common Sense Leadership PAC. Said PAC didn’t raise any other money but managed to spend $3500 on consultants. Namely $2K to Shayne Spence, a staffer at the Ethan Allen Institute, and $1500 to Elizabeth Metraux who is apparently the PR person for Vermont PBS.

— Republicrat Senate hopeful Roger Allbee pulled in a decent $4760 this time around for a grand total of $6K. His total take included a nice $1,000 donation from soon-to-be-ex-Senator Peter Galbraith. The Slummin’ Solon, who has publicly endorsed Allbee, was nonetheless chosen to moderate one of the four Windham County Democratic Senatorial candidate forums, a curious move to be sure. (During that debate, he reportedly got into an argument with fellow Senator Jeanette White. Not very statesmanlike or diplomatic, Petey.)

— Celebrity tidbit: The aforementioned Senator White can brag of a $100 donation from Mr. Tom Bodett. Leavin’ the light on for ya!

The Milne Transcripts, part 2: The accusation

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Early on in Scott Milne’s epic appearance on WDEV’s Mark Johnson Show last Friday, the Republican gubernatorial candidate unleashed a tough accusation against Governor Shumlin’s team — basically accusing them of bringing political pressure to bear against Republican donors.

Johnson had asked Milne about fundraising, and specifically about his relatively paltry take of $20,000 so far. Milne asserted that things were going according to plan, and said “I’m not all that actively pursuing money yet.” Johnson was surprised by this, and asked “You’re not actively pursuing money?” And Milne responded:

We’ve got a strategy for fundraising. I’ve got a fundraiser on board and she knows what she’s doing. But I’m not going to spend eight hours a day on the phone begging for money, and I’m clearly not going to call people up who donate to my opponent and ask them why, which is a widely known fact about this administration. 

Emphasis mine. Johnson was a bit incredulous, and followed up: “They do that? To people who contribute to you?” Milne’s response:

No, not me. But in the past. Get people on the show and ask them. But that’s clearly part of the Shumlin agenda.

Milne didn’t directly present this as a case of political blackmail, but that was the clear intent. A pretty damning accusation, presented completely without evidence. Yeah, “get people on the show and ask them.” As if victims of political pressure would freely own up to it on the radio.

Well, I ran this by Erika Wolffling, Shumlin campaign staffer this year and in 2012, which would seem to be the year Milne is hinting at. (A pressure play would have been ineffective in 2010, when Shumlin wasn’t even Governor yet.) Her very concise response:

That’s a bizarre statement, and it’s absolutely false.

So there. Ball’s in your court, Mr. Milne. If you have people willing to substantiate your accusation — on or off the record — I would be happy to speak with them. If you’ve read my stuff for very long, you know that I’m a liberal but an honest broker, willing to criticize members of any party if they’re in the wrong. And if there’s evidence that this accusation isn’t “absolutely false,” I’d consider it newsworthy and I would report it in this space. You know where to find me.

The Milne Transcripts series will continue very soon.