These are not final numbers but I was looking at spending by Assembly candidates in this past primary season. My guess was that Republican candidates for the Assembly in reasonably safe seats raised and spent less money in 2010 than they did in 2008.
Total expenditures during the reporting periods are helpful because if people loan themselves money and it is real then we see it spent. $100,000 going in and out of an account does not come into play by looking at expenditures.
My comparison did not include and look at independent expenditures and was focused on the final reporting period prior to the election. 8 seats from each cycle. I tossed out AD 5 and AD 68 from this cycle because of the dominant posture of the two primary winners.
In 2008 I looked at —
AD 2 (Nielsen, Schaupp)
AD 3 (Logue, Horne)
AD 10 (Sieglock, Hegyi, Sander)
AD 15 (Wilson, Kamena, Rao, Lloyd)
AD 34 (Conway, Smith, Becky Maze)
AD 36 (Knight, Fox, Ledford)
AD 64 (Nestande, McCarty)
AD 71 (Miller, Blais)
In 2010 I considered —
AD 25 (Olsen, Keating, van der Weide, Conrad)
AD 29 (Halerman, McKinney, Whalen)
AD 32 (Grove, Mettler)
AD 33 (Achadjian, Waterfield, Kokkonen)
AD 59 (Donnelley, Riley, Lancaster, Calaycay)
AD 63 (Morrell, Warren, Kurth, Gilbreath, Chabot)
AD 70 (Wagner, Amante, Choi)
AD 77 (Jones, Rubin, Wells)
According to the Secretary of State’s website comparing expenditures from the final reporting periods 3/18/08 to 5/17/08 with 3/18/10 to 5/22/10 I notice that total expenditures went from $3,171,160 to $2,460,184. That is a big drop.
In 2008 Steve Knight won in AD 36 by spending $83,094 in this period. That was the smallest amount spent among the Republican primary winners in 2008.
In 2010 we have Kristin Olsen in AD 25 at $71,543, Tim Donnelley in AD 59 that never actually filed an electronic report thus under $50,000, and Bran Jones in AD 77 at $26,721 all winning with substantially less spent during this time period.
This year Etta Waterfield in AD 33 at $198,889 and Don Kurth in AD 63 at $192,902 are the only candidates even close to $200,000 spend in this period. No other candidate is over $165,000.
Just two years ago we saw two candidates over $300,000 (Rao and Kamena in AD 15) and another over $200,000 (Miller in AD 71). We had eight candidates that spent more than $165,000.