The Dallas Morning News‘ Trailblazers blog is breathless: Democrat Wendy Davis raised more money than Republican frontrunner Greg Abbott! It’s a sign of the GOPacalypse!
Look for Wendy Davis this week to report more than $10 million raised in the latest fundraising cycle for her uphill battle against Republican Attorney General Greg Abbott in the governor’s race.
Word from inside the Davis camp is that her fundraising haul over the last six months will be north of $10 million — and will include some big-dollar donors whose contributions are crucial to a successful statewide candidate.
Davis ended up announcing that she had raised $12.2 million, which would be impressive if it were true. But it isn’t true.
Will Franklin does the media’s job and looks at the real numbers. It turns out that Davis’ campaign raised $8.7 million, which isn’t a bad haul. It’s far short of what she told media to expect, but it’s not bad. The other millions that she claims are in a different account that is not traditionally included in a campaign’s report:
Wendy Davis’ campaign performed a bit of fuzzy math plastic surgery and added $3.5 million from an additional, separate committee (Texas Victory Committee, Inc., which is apparently an offshoot of the Obama-affiliated Battleground Texas) to the mix. And most journalists just let her get away with it. Some establishment media outlets even declared Davis the winner. Fox News– inexplicably– reported $12.5 million for Davis, which makes absolutely no sense.
Davis promised that her campaign would raise more than $10 million in the second half of 2013. It did not. That’s a fact. It’s also a fact that Abbott raised more than she did over the same period, bringing in about $11.5 million, to ring up a total of about $27 million raised to date.
Let’s see how allegedly non-partisan mainstream media newsmen here in Texas handled the story, of Wendy Davis telling a whopper about her fundraising. Mr. Braddock bills himself as a serious, balls and strikes, non-partisan sort of guy.
Ingenious! What next, a “Gerald Ford was a klutz!” joke? That’s only slightly more of a non sequitur than attacking the retiring governor to give cover for a lie told by someone in the other party who wants his job.
Media could be using this moment to challenge the honesty and integrity of Davis’ campaign. They could build a narrative of its amateurish dishonesty on last week’s episode in which Davis trotted out an education plan that had no numbers behind it, and on which she has cast a vote that suggests opposition to part it in the past. Media could be asking Davis where most of her money is coming from — Texas or elsewhere? They could be asking her to explain why she counted money that she did not raise and is not in her accounts as if she did raise it and does control it.
But they’re not asking any of those questions.
When you have mainstream media not only not calling out Democrats when they lie, but actively and voluntarily stepping up to cover for them, well, you have a day that ends in “y.”
Update: More media shenanigans. They’re advancing Wendy Davis’ dishonesty.
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