Heitkamp Still Lagging Behind Berg In North Dakota Fundraising

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Written By:
Rob Port

Sep 28, 2012
11:09am

Today the Heitkamp campaign, without releasing any of the actual details, announced that they had raised more from North Dakotans than any other previous Democrat campaign. “U.S. Senate candidate Heidi Heitkamp has reached a financial milestone, having raised $1 million from North Dakota donors from November 1, 2011 to September 25, 2012,” reads the press release. “No other statewide Democratic candidate has ever raised that much money in state.”

The exact figure given by the campaign $1,042,215.18.

It would be easy to game these numbers. A big infusion of cash from the campaign coffers of Byron Dorgan or Kent Conrad, for instance, who are nominally from North Dakota but haven’t actually called this state home for years would skew the figure by quite a bit. And claiming that you’ve raised more in North Dakota than any other Democrat candidate is sort of funny given how Dorgan, Conrad and former Rep. Earl Pomeroy all routinely got more than 90% of their contributions from out of state.

They set the bar pretty low for Heitkamp to get over.

But stipulating to the truthfulness of the number for a moment, it’s not very impressive in the context of Rick Berg’s in-state fundraising.

Berg hasn’t released updated numbers including the most recent fundraising period yet (I’ve asked for them), but according to OpenSecrets.org through June 30th of this year Berg had already raised $904,173 from North Dakotans.

This means that, given three more months, the Heitkamp campaign was just barely able to edge out Rick Berg’s level of monetary support among North Dakotans.

That’s not really anything to brag about. Once the Berg campaign releases their figures, the Heitkamp campaign will almost certainly be trailing again badly in fundraising in the state. And to the degree that fundraising can be used as a metric for popular support, that doesn’t speak highly for the liberal candidate’s chances.