Photo courtesy of flickr user Randy Bayne.
You may have seen a Connecticut Post report floating around the Internet this morning that looks at Sen. Chris Dodd’s fundraising report from the first quarter of 2009 and finds that there are only five citizens from Connecticut who donated. Those five plucky Nutmeg Staters gave a total of $4,250. Dodd has a 33 percent popularity rating and is losing in hypothetical match-ups to basically every Republican pollsters can find. The citizens of CT clearly don’t want him around. So how did Dodd raise $1,048,674 in just three months?
As Daniel Schulman and I report in our story today, it mostly came from Big Finance. Here’s the breakdown. Executives and PACs representing banks, financial services companies, and real estate brokerages gave Dodd at least $299,000. (NB: That means the folks that Dodd, chairman of the Banking committee, is supposed to oversee gave 70 times more than the folks Dodd is supposed to represent.) Insurers and health care interests gave $48,000. And lobbyists, many of whom have Wall Street clients, chipped in $62,800 more.
So there you have it. It’s no wonder the folks that Dodd represents aren’t terribly excited about having him back. It’s not clear who he represents anymore.
Update: Keep in mind, there is a way to eliminate this whole money-in-politics game….
