A Roll Call story this morning outlined the seemingly sinking ship that is Katie McGinty’s Senate campaign.
Top takeaways:
- McGinty can’t raise money
- McGinty is unable to connect with voters
- McGinty hasn’t been able to use her “overwhelming institutional support” to break away from primary challengers
In case you missed it, there’s more bad news for McGinty here:
Establishment Favorite Lags in Pennsylvania Senate Primary
Roll Call
Senate Democrats are confident that their primary races this year will turn out exactly as they hope, with one exception.
Pennsylvania’s Democratic Senate primary is a giant question mark to even seasoned operatives in Washington and the Keystone State.
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[Katie McGinty’s] overwhelming institutional support hasn’t helped overcome 64-year-old Sestak’s early lead in the polls, or more surprisingly, his fund-raising advantage. And six weeks before the April 26 primary, that’s led to a sense among Democrats in Pennsylvania that Sestak and not McGinty should be regarded as the race’s narrow front-runner.
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Rendell, the ex-governor who is serving as chairman of McGinty’s campaign, says his candidate will have to raise plenty of money fast to prevail in an air war: “There is no campaign in a state our size until there’s TV."
He has already stirred controversy by acknowledging that McGinty has been struggling to raise money and needs a surge of TV ads from outside groups to win.
In an interview with Roll Call, he said he thought raising money for McGinty –- who collected roughly $1 million in contributions in the third and fourth fund-raising quarters — has been hard because of the Democratic presidential primary and this summer’s Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia.
“I’m helping her as much as I can, but there’s so much competition” for donations from Democrats, said Rendell, the one-time mayor of Philadelphia who estimated that McGinty and allies such as Emily’s List – whose political arm announced an investment on behalf of the candidate last week worth about $1 million — would need to spend $600,000 a week on TV ads for the next six weeks.
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The bigger worry about McGinty is whether, as a candidate for office, she connects with voters. She has run in just one major race before her current contest, a 2014 gubernatorial campaign in which she finished last in a four-way Democratic primary.
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One Democratic strategist watching the race compared her to Al Gore, suggesting that although McGinty is impressive in one-on-one settings, she loses something when trying to appeal to broader audiences.
In an interview, she suggested she was similar to Hillary Clinton, who made headlines during a presidential debate last week when she said that she wasn’t a natural politician: “I love people, but I’m more of a work horse than a show horse. I like to roll up my sleeves and get stuff done, and so the kind of talking about it for talking-about-its sake is not my favorite thing to do.”
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