Candidates for public office will spend a lot of time attending fundraisers and raising money, it is kinda what they do. There is however one source of money that no candidate of either party wants to admit to having. You know, that kind of money that comes from those people...
These of course are the lobbyists, special interests, and industries that pollute our democratic process. So when looking over the list of industries that are donating to our candidate what is there to be seen?
Starting with our veteran incumbent Sen. Murray there area wide variety of industries represented. Some of the top contributors are coming from: Lawyers/Law Firms ($608,937), Lobbyists ($497,450), Democratic/Liberal ($225,637), Computer/Internet ($326,633), Real Estate ($198,037), Air Transport ($170,799), Public Sector Unions ($111,700). Sen. Murray has a wide variety of interest groups contributing to her campaign.
Our brave challenger Mr. Rossi is not without a group of special interest groups supporting his candidacy: Retired ($210,321), Securities and Investment ($103,401), Real Estate ($62,695), Retail Sales ($19,200), Misc. Finance ($31,178), Republican/Conservative ($39,695), Business Services ($18,112). Mr. Rossi has collected a nice group of supporters among special interests.
Clearly, there is an enormous difference in amount of money each of these candidates has raised, this is due to two things: the data is sadly a bit outdated still (it's the best I can find though) and the fact that Sen. Murray is an incumbent. This incumbent word is becoming pretty in vogue on this blog.
Looking solely at money from the both the individual companies and by extension their industry groups there is a clear advantage for Sen. Murray, but the finical advantage is just one of many that the incumbent is going to hold over their challenger and maybe the not so subtle reason that these two articles have been posted is to build the foundation for the notion of "incumbent advantage" which will be built upon further in a future post.
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