January 16, 2018 01:39 PM UTC

Fundraising Numbers for Colorado Candidates

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• by: Colorado Pols

UPDATE (3:00pm): Democrat Noel Ginsburg reports $224,668 in contributions for Q4…but $190,000 of that came from his own pockets. Officially, Ginsburg now has $223,733 in the bank.

According to a press release, Ginsburg’s campaign seems happy to pretend that personal checks from the candidate should be counted as donations:

Democrat Noel Ginsburg today announced strong year-end fundraising numbers in his bid for Colorado’s next Governor. Ginsburg raised more than $790,000 in 2017.

“I’d like to thank our many donors and volunteers for giving us strong momentum,” said Ginsburg, who recently finished a tour of the state.

Of the $790,000 that Ginsburg “raised” in 2017, at least $340,000 came from donors named “Noel Ginsburg.” When you include his personal checks, Ginsburg only received about $34,000 from donors in Q4.

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UPDATE (1:46pm): Republican Brian Watson reports raising $179,530 for his campaign for State Treasurer. Watson contributed about $18k of his own money to that total, and has $153,647* in the bank.

*Watson’s campaign finance report also lists a $32,000 “contribution” for something labeled “opposition research,” but the filing doesn’t indicate that this was a personal in-kind contribution. This is probably not legal.

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UPDATE (11:55 am): Republican Victor Mitchell (Governor) seems content to self-fund his campaign. Mitchell’s campaign reported just $4,324 in contributions for a cash-on-hand total of $2,175,432 (Mitchell wrote his campaign a $3 million check early last year). Mitchell’s campaign spent $113,162 in Q4 (2017).

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Democratic Secretary of State (SOS) candidate Jen Griswold announced this morning that her campaign raised $58,381 in Q4 and now has a total of $115,537 in the bank. These are strong numbers for a challenger in a lower-tier statewide race such as SOS.

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Fundraising reports from Q4 (2017) are due to be filed with the Colorado Secretary of State’s office today. We’ll keep a running update here on some of the most noteworthy numbers as they become available.