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No fewer than 18 candidates have formally announced or have said they are considering a race for the Democratic nomination to take on Gov. Scott Walker in November.
Without any clear frontrunner to support or oppose (think how easy it was to be for or against Hillary Clinton) what’s a Democratic voter to do?
In the last couple of weeks some actual data has come out that helps us sort through the field. On Jan. 11 Public Policy Polling, a Democratic polling firm out of North Carolina, issued the results of its robocall poll, which it says has a margin of error of 3.6 percent. And on Jan. 17, all the candidates, except Madison mayor Paul Soglin, who announced late, were required to submit campaign finance reports.
Sifting through all that data, here are some things that we might find interesting.
Evers continues to do well. I have long believed that state Superintendent Tony Evers was running the best technical campaign. The information we have seems to support that conclusion. Evers is leading the rest of the field by a wide margin. The PPP poll has him at 29 percent among likely Democratic voters. The next nearest candidates are Sen. Kathleen Vinehout of Alma at 11 percent and Soglin at 10 percent, but a full 28 percent are undecided at this point. Evers spent $225,000 between July and December but it seems to have been money well invested, and he has over three times more donors than the nearest candidate as 2,452 people have contributed to his campaign.
Flynn and Mitchell are surprising in a good way. In my last horse race blog late last year I didn’t even bother to call out former Democratic Party Chair Matt Flynn by name; rather lumping him in with a host of also-rans. But even though he didn’t formally get into the race until October, Flynn has more money on hand, $305,000, than any of the others. He sits at 5 percent in the PPP poll along with Mahlon Mitchell and Mike McCabe, but he seems to find his way into news stories and he’s got good buzz going among Democratic insiders. His campaign seems worth watching after all.
Despite an even later entry into the race in mid November, firefighters union leader and one time lieutenant governor candidate Mitchell has raised more money, excluding contributions or loans from the candidate, than anyone else in the field: $396,000. In fact, Mitchell is the only candidate who has none of his own money at all in his account, yet he has $247,000 on hand, second only to Flynn. We’ll know if he’s for real if that 5 percent vote share shoots up into the double digits at the next reading.
McCabe, Vinehout, Wachs and Gronik are surprising in a bad way. We can split these four candidates into two groups: establishment and anti-establishment candidates. Rep. Dana Wachs of Eau Claire and Milwaukee business guy Andy Gronik are taking a mainstream liberal tack while Vinehout and clean elections activist Mike McCabe make more of an outsider, anti-establishment argument. But none of them look strong at this point.
Gronik has got to be scratching his head, wondering where all the money went. Back in July he became the first credible candidate to announce and since then he has spent $450,000 of his own money with nothing to show for it. In the PPP poll he sits at only 2 percent, second from last among the nine candidates on that list.
Despite a good reputation among Capitol denizens and the early endorsement of liberal lion and former U.S. Rep. Dave Obey, Wachs comes in at only 4 percent in the poll. He has been in the race almost as long as Gronik, entering the field in August, and has loaned his campaign $235,000. Like Gronik, he has to be wondering if it’s all worth it.
I had thought McCabe would be formidable as he seemed to have the outsider, reformer schtick nailed down (the official name of his campaign committee is Commoners for McCabe, believe it or not). It seemed as if he would be better positioned than any other candidate, with the possible exception of Vinehout, to claim the Bernie Sanders mantle. But that just doesn’t seem to be happening. McCabe raised only $79,000 outside of $25,000 he and his wife kicked in and he has only $21,000 on hand. And, while you’d expect the grassroots-obsessed candidate to have lots of small contributors, his 719 commoners are less than one-third of Evers’ donors and less than two other candidates as well.
Vinehout can feel good about her 11 percent second place showing in the poll, but she’s raised only $83,000, almost as little as McCabe, and has less money on hand than any of the top candidates, only $15,000. I would be surprised now if she hasn’t topped out at that 11 percent.
For this analysis we’ll leave former State Rep. Kelda Roys and Soglin out. Roys didn’t get in the race until December and has $150,000 on hand, but most of that is her own money. She got only 1 percent in the PPP poll, but she really had no time to make any mark at all. Soglin announced only a couple of weeks ago and his 10 percent poll showing is probably due to saturation name recognition in deep blue Dane County as well as a long political career. It’s just too early to get a good read on either candidacy.
So, for now, this horse race seems to have Evers, Flynn and Mitchell fighting for the lead, but they’re only rounding the first turn. There’s plenty of time for the others, even those who have stumbled out of the gate or who got a late start, to catch up.
