A "little bird" suggested to me recently that in New Hampshire congressional district one, there were two candidates driving hard for the attention of the grass roots, Frank Guinta and Sean Mahoney. The comment caught my attention because it was just a tiny bit derisive, as if neither of them even deserved that kind of support. He was obviously backing someone else so I left it alone, but I did find it interesting that he thought Mr. Mahoney was courting the grass roots. Mr. Mahoney never struck me as the grass roots type. I always pictured him as more of an institutional republican, someone like Rich Ashooh; active and connected, has money or knows people with money, with a hint of the K-street ruling class mentality. You know, like Charlie Bass.
I guess I just didn’t recall Sean Mahoney and no offense to whatever his other redeeming qualities might be, courting the roots, the tips, the tea leaves or anything else. But I can’t know everyone, even though I know enough "someone’s" to have second or third hand access to almost everyone in the NH grass roots. Maybe Mr. Mahoney really was trying to make in-roads and was simply not doing a very good job of it? Or maybe I’d missed out on a well hidden patch of Fescue or Rye and there was something to this?
Lacking any personal grass roots endorsements that I was aware of I figured I’d take a quick visit to the FEC web site to see who was donating to Sean Mahoney. While the grass roots will often invest most of their effort on the ground more than a few will drop some donation dollars in a candidate’s campaign chest as a show of support, even ones that don’t need it; the numbers of donors can be as important as the money when you want an indicator of interest in the candidate. Is the money from in-state out or state? Or maybe a major donor name would lead me somewhere. (I considered calling the campaign but rumor has it they are not happy with Grok Bloggers at the moment so I took a pass; the FEC was my best bet for gauging interest if nothing else.)
As it turns out Sean Mahoney is the guy most interested in his campaign and unfortunately very little else is in evidence. The FEC has no specific records posted for the $927,000.00 Mr. Mahoney has taken in, not just because $800,000.00 of it was a personal loan from Sean to himself. A query on the remaining $125,000.00 listed at the FEC as "individual contributions" produced zero results. A trip to News meat only found records from previous campaign efforts. And Open Secrets had no detailed data on anyone but Carol Shea-Porter. So as of 6/30/2010 Sean shows no 2010 PAC money donations, no 2010 candidate contributions, and no transfers. There is just-over $800K from himself, and another $125K from an unknown number of individual donors.
There is no way to tell where the money is coming from other than from Sean Mahoney.
So whatever that is going on over at the Mahoeny campaign, I don’t think it indicative of broad support, and it certainly is not representative of grass roots or tea party support given everything else I know. Not yet anyway. Of course we’ll never know if he doesn’t file a detailed donor report with the FEC we can actually look at. And maybe that’s something they should spend some time on so we can get a better look at who supports Sean, which will tell us more about who he is politically. I mean for all we know, he could be Batman.