The Shadow
RICHMOND (AP) – If 2009’s deep recession kept campaign donations from breaking records in the governor’s race, it didn’t bother donors in the robust round of Virginia House of Delegates races.
Democratic state Sen. R. Creigh Deeds and his victorious Republican opponent, Bob McDonnell, raised nearly $41 million combined in the 2009 governor’s race.
The governor’s race in 2005 generated $45 million, or nearly 10 percent more in contributions.
The figures come from final campaign finance reports from last year’s races filed last week with the State Board of Elections and compiled into a database by the Virginia Public Access Project, a nonpartisan and nonprofit tracker of money in Virginia politics.
For McDonnell, contributions totaled nearly $23.8 million compared with $17.1 million for Deeds in 2009. But neither man raised as much as their parties’ nominees did four years earlier, when Democrat Timothy M. Kaine defeated Republican Jerry W. Kilgore.
The 2009 candidate figures, however, do not account for unprecedented independent political spending done by outside groups on behalf of both parties in a Virginia governor’s race last year. The Democratic Governors Association and its counterpart, the Republican Governors Association, both pumped millions of dollars into the state to establish political action committees in Virginia. Each PAC was tasked with airing attack ads against the adversary.
Virginia and New Jersey were the only states to elect governors in 2009, and Republicans won both. They were watched as an early voter verdict on the job President Barack Obama and an allied Democratic Congress had done in their first year.
But the stakes were even higher in Virginia, where Obama led a 2008 Democratic sweep and became the first of his party to win a presidential race in the former Confederate cradle since 1964. A year ago, Obama appointed Kaine chairman of the Democratic National Committee.
Outside political sector giving from allied partisan committees, the top givers to last year’s rival campaigns, were polar opposites.
McDonnell’s second-largest donor by sector was the real estate and construction industry, which contributed $3 million. Business and retail services gave him nearly $2.7 million, followed by the finance and insurance sector at $2.3 million.
Deeds’ No. 2 donor group was organized labor, which donated nearly $2.4 million to the Democrat in a state with a long history of anti-union laws. Lawyers and law firms were the third-largest Deeds donor group at $1.5 million, followed by real estate and construction at $1.3 million.
Both parties fought fiercely over seats in the 100-member House of Delegates.
The $39 million raised collectively in House races last year was nearly one-fifth more than the previous record of nearly $33 million set in 2007. House members seek re-election every two years.
One reason is the unusually high number of contested seats: 69.
Democrats initially expected to continue winning seats away from the GOP majority as they had done in every legislative election since 2003. But energized Republicans enjoyed a net gain of six House seats, giving them 61 of the seats counting two independent conservatives who caucus with the GOP.
No single group ponied up more to House candidates than the Virginia Dental Association, with contributions totaling $306,500, according to VPAP. A battle over health care spending in an austere new two-year budget through 2012 pits insurance companies and major employers who provide dental coverage for their workers against dentists who worry about their reimbursement rates.
More familiar interests rounded out the top five in total giving for House races: the Virginia Association of Realtors, $288,370; the Virginia Bankers Association, $278,600; The Virginia Hospital & Healthcare Association, $221,500; and the state’s dominant electrical utility, Dominion, at $203,842.
