The end of the month is near, which means Democrat email boxes will be filled with desperate cries for help from the still-very-green governor Jay Inslee, as he tries to fill his re-election campaign piggy bank, to scare off any prospective primary challenger who is unimpressed – as are we all – by his performance so far in office. Depressingly, the end-of-August begging has already started.
The problem with Jay’s approach is that so far it doesn’t seem to be working very well for an incumbent governor – with a couple notable exceptions.
The proof of his struggle to build support among Washington voters was in his last comprehensive fundraising report, filed earlier this month. That document showed that Inslee is heavily dependent on a few key sources to keep him away from the kind of deficit spending so popular with liberals, as he has already spent more than half the money his campaign has reported taking in since he started his re-election account in December, 2012.
The figures, so far ignored by the mainstream media, are stunning. Jay has already burned through almost $1.1 million of the $1.9 million in campaign “receipts” since he launched his re-election effort with a transfer of $190k left over from his 2012 account.
To keep his campaign from appearing in as much disarray as his administration of our state, the Democrat Party was kind enough to send Inslee $200,000 on the last day of July. The party appears to have been able to launder that big chunk of change into his account thanks to an infusion of cash from some of the few groups impressed by Inslee’s performance so far – $100,000 from the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) and $85,000 from the Democrat Governor’s Association (DGA).
Of course, the DGA (largely supported by unions and trial lawyers across the country) has no choice but to support Inslee – its primary job is to protect its incumbent office holders. However, the state employees union had been seemingly holding on to its cash until Inslee delivered on the pay raises which he had secretly negotiated with their members last year, and which Inslee had fought to include in the final state budget passed during the special sessions required by his insistence on tax increases to pay for those raises.
Certainly the state employees union is pleased that the $1 million donated to help elect Inslee in 2012 turned out to be such a good investment, given the nearly $1 billion in raises and benefits Inslee gave them in the secret negotiations. However, imagine how much more the union might have given Inslee/the state Democrat Party if he had also given in to the union demand for the right to have its members go on strike against the state (by refusing to cross picket lines) and still get paid, as negotiators had asked Inslee last year.
The results from this month’s fundraising appeals won’t be reported for a couple more weeks. What is known is that Inslee had been tapping the state party for campaign help long before July, as he his campaign reported a total of $58k from the Dems in 2013 and 2014, to help it look like his fundraising wasn’t going so poorly. And, it appears that he will be hitting them again in August, courtesy of another $100k donated by the DGA to state Democrats on August 12 – which is very likely to end up being washed into Jay’s re-election campaign to make it look like his month-end email cries for help are working with actual people in Washington State.
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