Duane Sand Has Spent Almost $30,000 More On Fundraising Then He’s Actually Raised
Despite running for federal office in just about every single election cycle since 2000 and losing, Duane Sand still has a small but vocal conservative following in the state. And I can’t imagine why. Sand is the consummate political opportunist. Back during the 2008 election cycle Sand was handing out buttons aligning himself with John McCain. But then, when tea parties got popular, suddenly Sand was a tea party candidate, claiming to be one of the founders of the movement in North Dakota (this despite not having attended an actual tea party rally in 2009 when the movement launched).
Sand has support because I think some people just have a fetish for primary challengers. They consider themselves to be “anti-establishment” and so will glom on to any candidate who they perceive as “anti-establishment” without spending a lot of time thinking about policy or philosophy or anything like that.
But in case anyone was curious about just how much of a bad joke Duane Sand’s campaign for US Senate this cycle really is, take a look at his fundraising numbers. I wrote a couple of weeks ago that Sand’s campaign was $120,000 in the hole. Jim Fuglie notes that if you add up all the money Sand has spent on fundraising, it comes out to almost $30,000 more then he’s actually raised:
Duane Sand’s FEC report shows that, so far, in his 2012 campaign for the U.S. Senate, he has spent $594,498. And it also shows that, as of March 31, he had debts of $205,861. And those debts aren’t loans. They are unpaid bills. Added together, those numbers come to $800,346. That’s how much money Duane Sand has spent so far in his campaign for the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate.
Hmmmm. So where’d it go? How’d he spend all that money? Well, he spent most of it . . . . drum roll . . . . raising money.
If you add up all the expenditures for fundraising by the Sand campaign, plus the unpaid bills to companies which did the fundraising for him, it comes to $705,114–about $29,000 more than he has actually raised.
That’s right, all the money Duane Sand has raised, plus $28,723 he hasn’t raised yet, has been spent on fundraising.
You can see Sand’s full FEC report below, and it’s a depressing read. This is a candidate who is already well over $100,000 as a result of his campaign, and is actually losing money by fundraising. If you want to know why Democrats aren’t even bothering to include Sand in their manufactured hype polls, this is why.
Sand is challenging Rep. Rick Berg on the June primary ballot for the Republican nomination for US Senate. Per the numbers above, and judging by Sand’s political competence in general, a vote for Sand on that ballot may as well be a vote for Heidi Heitkamp.
