Did the dustup over Wendy Davis’ personal story help campaign fundraising? Looks like it did
Did the national political uproar over Wendy Davis’ biography boost her fundraising? A look at her most recent campaign contribution reports suggests it just might have done so. The Dallas Morning News story that raised questions about Davis’ single-mom-in-a-trailer-to-Harvard Law School narrative — most notably that she never actually was a divorced teen mother raising a daughter in a trailer and that her second husband paid for college by taking out a loan and keeping her daughters — caused quite a ruckus. Critics accused Davis of embroidering her up-from-poverty personal story. Supporters leaped furiously to her defense.
The story was published January 19. The latest fundraising report for January shows that Davis raised about $362,000 in itemized donations before the story and $349,000 after it. But the reporting period covered money raised between January 1-24. That means there were 18 days to raise money before the story and only four fundraising days afterwards.
So, on a per/day basis, Davis did lots better in the days after the controversy erupted when, it appears, an army of supporters responded with their checkbooks. On a daily average, Davis raised more than four times as much after the story was published than before. Before publication, she was pulling in about $20,000 a day in January. After the battle erupted between supporters and opponents upon publication of the story, she raised $87,000 a day. And some of those donations were among her biggest of the period — $15,000 contributions from the Texas State Teachers Association and Mesquite lawyer Ted Lyon, a former Democratic member of the Texas Senate. Also, a $10,000 post-story contribution from the locomotive workers union.
Whether that boost in campaign contributions continued into February, won’t be known until later this month. The Davis campaign declined to say whether the fundraising boost was a blip or has continued. “You’ll probably be able to draw a more complete analysis after the next report comes out,” said spokesman Bo Delp.
Source: http://trailblazersblog.dallasnews.com/2014/02/did-the-dustup-over-wendy-davis-personal-story-help-campaign-fundraising-looks-like-it-did.html/ (this is the entire article).
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