Kentucky Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes outraised her incumbent opponent again, reportedly hauling in 2.7 million (compared to Sen. Mitch McConnell’s 2.4 million).
But while one might expect McConnell, the Senate Minority Leader, to fill his coffers with out-of-state dollars, as the Wall Street Journal’s Patrick O’Connor observed, “by the end of 2013, [Grimes] had raised three times more money from donors in greater Los Angeles than she had from supporters in either Lexington or Louisville, Ky. And she raised more money from two ZIP Codes in Beverly Hills, Calif., than any other ZIP Codes in the country.”
Raising this kind of money is, no doubt, a boon to her candidacy — but it also makes it harder for Grimes to argue that McConnell is the one beholden to out-of-state special interests.
Of course, the numbers cited by O’Connor were from last quarter. But one needn’t conduct a complete audit of Grimes’ latest (and, no doubt, byzantine) FEC report to get a sense of whether or not the trend continued this quarter. All you need is a Google search:
There was the January 13 fundraiser hosted by DreamWorks chief Jeffrey Katzenberg (who raised a cool million for her in September), the February 17 event with Michigan Sen. Debbie Stabenow, the February 25 fundraiser with Bill Clinton, the March 2 event in Palm Beach, FL with the DSCC chairman, the March 11 funder in Washington, DC, and (last but not least) the March 20 event in Chicago with Mayor Rahm Emanuel.
Did I miss anything?