Duane Sand’s Campaign Is $120,000 In The Hole

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Written By:
Rob Port

Apr 15, 2012
9:49pm

Duane Sand is a sort of conservative insurgent candidate with a passionate following that makes him competitive up against Rep. Rick Berg, who Sand is challenging for the Senate nomination on the June primary ballot.

That’s what I’m told, anyway, by conservative/tea party friends in the state who insist that he’s a better alternative to Rick Berg. But if Sand has a passionate following, it doesn’t seem to be manifesting itself fundraising numbers.

Sand is famous (infamous?) for putting up fairly large fundraising numbers, but also spending a lot of money to do it. His latest quarterly numbers, for the first three months of 2012, are no different. Sand raised a lot of money, but he’s got $120,000 more in campaign debt then he’s got in his coffers.

FARGO – Republican U.S. Senate candidate Duane Sand raised more than $250,000 in the first three months of 2012, but he also holds $200,000 in reported debt, according to his latest filing to the Federal Election Commission.

Sand will challenge Republican-endorsed candidate Rep. Rick Berg in the June 12th primary. His campaign provided The Forum on Sunday with the summary pages of his first-quarter report to the FEC. …

Sand reported having $81,200 in cash on hand, as of April 1, and $205,800 worth of unpaid debts and obligations.

This despite Sand associating himself with high-profile politicos like Herman Cain and Dick Morris. Which is a hallmark of Sand’s style, I think. He’s long on campaign gimmickry, short on substance.

Sand is likely to end this cycle with a huge amount of campaign debt, but that is typical of his campaigns. He’s had one federal campaign fund or another open for more than a decade (going back to his first run for the Senate in 2000), and he’s always working to retire debt from his last Quixotic tilt at federal office.

Giving Duane Sand the nomination to run for federal office for a fourth time, against Democrat Heidi Heitkamp in this cycle, would be a sure way to ensure that this Senate seat stays in the hands of Democrats.

For some reason Sand seems to garner a lot of interest from out-of-state conservative groups. I hear all the time from conservative friends who talk of these groups endorsing Sand over Berg. I wish these groups would spend a little more time piercing Sand’s smokescreen of political gamesmanship and get to know the candidate a little better, because he’s be no improvement over Berg.

What’s frustrating about Sand is that he could be a real asset to the conservative movement in the state, but he’s proven time and again that his personal ambition is all that matters. He abandoned an initiated measure for income tax cuts he started in 2008 to run for Congress, and in this cycle he abandoned an initiated measure to reform the state’s protectionist pharmacy laws to, again, run for Congress.

If Sand could set his ego aside and focus on the movement his political career might be further along than it is right now.