In The Weeds: Dems Dip Into Coordinated Allowance For McCaskill
The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) in December covered payroll and insurance expenses for staffers working to elect MO SEN candidate Claire McCaskill .
The $24K expenditure means absolutely nothing to MO voters and suggests very little to no more than a few dozen campaign professionals in DC and MO.
A DSCC spokesman called the payments irrelevant and significance-free.
Federal campaign finance law permits party committees to spend, in the case of Missouri, approximately $637K on coordinated expenditures over the course of the campaign. (The formula, for the record, is the state's voting age population, multiplied by two cents and titrated each cycle for federal cost of living adjustments.)
So far, the DSCC has spent about $94K towards that sum.
Republican researchers pouring over McCaskill's year-end FEC filing could not find an entry showing that any of the campaign's staff of eleven had been paid in December. Disbursements to a New York-based paycheck company were recorded through the end of November, only.
The GOPers discovered that that the DSCC, on Dec. 22, paid $24,107 to that paycheck company and listed McCaskill as benefiting from the expense.
The NRSC did not pick up campaign salaries for any of its candidates and the DSCC did not cover the same expenses for any other Senate campaign.
That leads the NRSC to conclude that, in the words of a spokesman there, the DSCC "clearly" was doing its best to make sure that McCaskill ended the year with as much cash on hand as possible.
According to that theory, the higher the number -- even if inflated by a paltry $24K -- the more favorably the small circle of Washington's elite political analysts would treat the health of McCaskill's campaign.
"We've seen Claire McCaskill follow the lead of liberal national Democrats on important issues before; now we see why," said Brian Walton, an NRSC spokesman.
The DSCC did not want to wade into the details. But they noted that the NRSC had, in fact, dipped into its coordinated expense allowance last summer for Maryland, paying more than $4K worth of expenses for MD Sen candidate Michael Steele.
Says Dan Ronayne, another NRSC spokesman: "It's a ridiculous stretch not see a difference between helping a campaign off the ground versus an attempt to deceive the political class with a higher cash on hand."
National committees routinely use the coordinated money to run television advertisements close to the election and to cover costs that the campaign cannot. And from that perspective, the DSCC, having kept more than $25M to spend nationwide on Senate campaigns, is in much better shape than the NRSC. [MARC AMBINDER]