Over at the Washington Examiner, Tim Carney has an excellent article on how Democratic Senate candidate Jon Ossoff is relying heavily on donors from outside Georgia to finance his campaign. In fact, Carney points out that the Democrat has more donors from California than he does from Georgia.
Incumbent Republican senator David Perdue, Ossoff’s opponent, is pulling down his biggest contributions from two major private employers in Georgia. Meanwhile,“Ossoff’s top sources of money are Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook.” Here are a few more details from Carney’s reporting:
Ossoff is dominating Perdue in terms of campaign cash, having outspent the incumbent $121 million to $73 million according to numbers released in mid-December.
Ossoff’s single biggest source of funds, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics, is Google’s parent company, Alphabet.
Companies cannot contribute to candidates, but employees and executives of Alphabet had given $952,685 to Ossoff’s campaign as of the Dec. 16 filing. Apple employees and executives gave Ossoff $295,794, followed by Microsoft employees and executives who contributed $275,864. Ossoff also raised more than $225,000 from Amazon and Facebook.
Compare those numbers to Perdue’s: The Georgia Republican’s top source of funds is, sensibly enough, Georgia’s largest employer, Delta. Perdue’s second-best source of donations is Georgia’s second-largest private employer, The Home Depot. His combined haul from the employees and executives of those two companies is $239,000, less than Ossoff raised just from Amazon, his No. 5 source of funds.
Here’s another telling number: Ossoff, according to my analysis of the latest campaign filing with the Federal Election Commission, raised $4.79 million from individual California donors, compared to only $2.83 million from individual Georgia donors.
This isn’t the first time that Ossoff has had such an issue while campaigning in his home state. He received similarly lopsided donations from Americans outside of Georgia when he ran for Congress in 2017, competing against Republican candidate Karen Handel in a special election for the chance to represent the sixth congressional district.
“Most of the itemized contributions to Mr. Ossoff were from large Democratic states like California and New York,” a New York Times report noted. “Just 14 percent came from Georgia, compared with 56 percent of Ms. Handel’s contributions.” In his Spring 2017 financial records, Ossoff reported receiving 7,218 donations from California and just 808 donations from Georgia.
Despite significant support from Democrats across the country in that race, Ossoff ended up losing to Handel by almost four points. His support from non-Georgia donors might be enabling him to outspend his Republican opponent, but the way it dwarfs his financial support from within the state isn’t a great sign for his chances in tomorrow’s runoff election.