Primary campaign dollars at work.
Mayor Toni Harp’s campaign poured money into out-of-state consultants and television ads and opposition research, while challenger Justin Elicker’s campaign focused its dollars on campaign staff, a Manchester-based consultancy, and Spanish-language radio advertisements.
The season left Elicker with $100,000 more cash on hand than Harp.
Those expenditures are included in incumbent Toni Harp and mayoral challenger Justin Elicker’s newly released campaign financial reports, both of which were submitted to the Secretary of the State’s electronic filing website on Tuesday.
Coming just a week before the Sept. 10 Democratic Party mayoral primary, the reports cover how much money each campaign raised and spent between July 1 and Sept. 1.
Click here to read the Harp campaign’s full “7th Day Preceding Primary” financial filing, and here to read the same from the Elicker campaign.
And click here and here to read about the campaigns’ first two financial filings.
On the expenditures side, the Harp campaign’s filing shows that the mayor’s reelection team spent a total of $131,757.76 between July 1 and Sept. 1, while the Elicker campaign spent a total of $107,217.12 during that same time period.
A deeper dive into those expenditures shows that just under half ($65,517) of the Harp campaign’s expenditures went to out-of-state advertising, opposition research, and Democratic candidate political consulting firms, while the remaining half went to everything from rent for the campaign’s headquarters at 50 Fitch St. to full-time and part-time campaign staff to campaign fundraising parties and events.
Christopher Peak photos
Mayor Toni Harp and mayoral challenger Justin Elicker last week at an early education forum.
Some of those opposition research and advertising dollars can be seen in some of the campaign’s more controversial attack ads, such as this television commercial that slams Elicker for supporting a police proposal to use drones to track dirt bikers.
The campaign paid a total of $20,456 to the Washington, D.C.-based targeted advertising and research agency Buying Time LLC.
It also paid $16,659 to the Glastonbury-based direct mailing company Mission Control, a total of $13,690 to the Baltimore, Maryland-based political consultancy The Mellinger Group, and $8,045 to the Alexandria, Virginia-based opposition research company Nesbitt & Parrinello Inc..
“We’re getting our message out and we’re doing that through all different avenue,” Harp’s campaign manager Ed Corey told the Independent. That includes radio, television, direct mail flyers, and door-to-door canvassing. The campaign has been hiring community members at $15 per hour, he said, as well as paying for professional advertising consultants to make sure that it gets its message out through a variety of media.
The Elicker campaign’s largest expenditures of the summer, meanwhile, were $49,011.86 in payments made to the Manchester-based political consultancy Blue Edge Strategies.
The mayoral challengers campaigned also paid $8,000 for advertisements on the local Spanish-language radio station Bomba Radio, $6,000 to the Colchester-based consultant Kevin Alvarez, $4,490.35 to the Southbury-based consultant Kimberly Ann Wipfler, and $3,500 to the Austin, Texas-based consultant Kyle Buda, who ran Elicker’s 2013 bid for mayor.
According to the filings, the Harp campaign has only $8,933.75 left on hand in the week before the primary, while the Elicker campaign has $111,650.31 still available.
“Not only do we have funds available to run a solid operation over the next week,” Elicker campaign manager Gage Frank is quoted as saying in a Tuesday press release, “but we are proud to submit our filing on time and with complete transparency. Meanwhile the public is still waiting on Mayor Harp to release the names of nearly $100,000 in campaign contributions from their 2017 campaign and another $5,700 in campaign contributions from the current re-election campaign. Mayor Harp has repeatedly promised she would release the names of these donors but has not done so. We need effective management in this City, and the way their campaign has been run the last 7 months is a testament to the mismanagement in City Hall.”
Harp Outraises Elicker This Summer; Elicker Outraises Harp This Year
On the fundraising side, Harp outraised Elicker for the second quarter in a row, bringing in $81,765 in individual contributions in comparison to Elicker’s $52,893.
In total for the year so far, Elicker has outraised Harp $303,938.49 to $226,398.10.
Elicker is participating in the municipal public financing program, the Democracy Fund, which limits individual campaign contributions to $390 a piece. Harp, who is not participating in the clean election program, can accept individual campaign contributions of up to $1,000.
In addition to the individual contributions received, the Harp campaign also got a $4,150 boost this summer from a variety of labor-based political committees, such as UNITE HERE TIP State& Local — Connecticut and Carpenters Local Union #326 PAC. She also raised $1,500 in program book advertising purchases, and received a $9,500 refund from the Rego Park, New York-based consultants Thirty Ninth Street Strategies.
Elicker, meanwhile, received $39,060 over the summer in Democracy Fund grants.
A campaign finance spreadsheet provided by the Elicker campaign to the Independent shows that he received 477 total contributions from 419 unique contributors between July 1 and Sept. 1.
Forty-nine of those contributions were at the maximum Democracy Fund amount of $390.
Sixty-one percent ($32,606) of the money he raised came from New Haven residents, 7.6 percent ($4,030) from Hamden residents, 4.2 percent ($2,250) from Branford residents, and the majority of the rest from people living elsewhere in the state.
Eighteen percent ($9,580) came from retirees, 8 percent ($4,160) from professors, 4.2 percent ($2,212) from attorneys, 3.6 percent ($1,910) from consultants, and 3.5 percent ($1,830) from teachers.
The Harp campaign did not provide a spreadsheet version of its recent campaign contributions to the Independent, though a search of her campaign’s PDF filing shows that she received a total of 361 individual contributions, 26 of which came at the maximum $1,000 level.
Compassionate Elicker with his compassionate op-Ed about being compassionate to the victims of overdose on the Green...using them as a political tool to win votes.
I wonder, would he govern as a champion of the poor and dispossessed or, once in office, will he cater to the places where he gets the most votes?
I wouldn't want to take a chance on that proposition.
Twenty six donors giving $1,000 to the mayor hardly screams out a need for an expensive public campaign system that pays for mailers like the one pictured in this article. Do we really want our taxpayer dollars going to trashing the city?