Otter, Simpson raise more cash
BOISE – Idaho’s two Republican congressmen picked up their fund-raising pace in May, heading into the final four months of their re-election campaigns with substantially more cash than they had on hand two years ago.
Campaign finance disclosure reports filed with the Federal Election Commission showed U.S. Rep. Butch Otter raising over $135,000 during April, May and June, compared to the $100,000 the First District congressman raised during the first three months of the year.
Otter, seeking a third term in anticipation of a 2006 bid for governor if Republican Dirk Kempthorne steps aside, has raised $412,000 and had $172,000 on hand to begin July. That was almost double the balance he reported two years ago in what was viewed as a much tougher re-election campaign against former U.S. Attorney Betty Richardson.
His counterpart, U.S. Rep. Michael Simpson, raised over $102,000 in the same three months, also nearly double the cash generated during the winter quarter.
Simpson, a former Idaho House speaker who represents conservative eastern and southern Idaho, has raised $325,000 and still had $165,000 of it in the bank on July 1, almost three times the balance he had in mid-2002 when he faced a political unknown in his bid for a third term.
Their opponents’ second quarter reports were not immediately made available by the commission on Monday. But cash has been minimal for both Naomi Preston, the Eagle businesswoman who pulled out of the race against Otter in May only to get back in early June, and former state Sen. Lin Whitworth, the Inkom labor activist who challenged Simpson in an effort to boost the unsuccessful initiative to repeal the state’s right-to-work law.
Preston had managed to raise $3,100 through early May when she dropped out of the race and augmented that with $5,000 of her own money. Whitworth had raised less than $11,000.
But the incumbents and challengers in the two congressional races combined raised less than half the money U.S. Sen. Michael Crapo has raised in his essentially unchallenged campaign for a second term.
Although Crapo’s second quarter report had yet to be filed with the commission on Monday, through early May he had raised nearly $1.5 million and had almost $1.2 million in the bank. It was only last month that he finally picked up an opponent, Democratic businessman Scott McClure from Twin Falls, who is running a write-in campaign against a man even Democratic leaders concede is one of the state’s most popular officeholders.
In the last seven months, Crapo has also raised nearly $160,000 for his personal political action committee, Freedom Fund. That money could finance a campaign within the U.S. Senate for a GOP leadership job, possibly chairman of the Republican Conference.
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