Paul Bass photo
Campaign lawn signs on primary day.
Mayor Toni Harp loaned her reelection campaign $13,500 of her own money as the campaign itself ended September with a negative $4,600-plus balance.
Those details are included in the Harp campaign’s latest campaign finance report.
She and mayoral challenger Justin Elicker, who won Sept. 10’s Democratic mayoral primary by 16 points over the three-term incumbent, filed their latest campaign finance reports Thursday on the State Election Enforcement Commission’s (SEEC) online database. The reports cover donations received and expenditures made between Sept. 2 and Sept. 30.
Click here and here to read the candidates’ third quarter filings, and here, here, and here for past campaign finance articles in this year’s mayoral race.
In total this year, Elicker’s campaign has outraised Harp’s by over $75,000 ($347,307.50 to $272,133.10) and outspent Harp’s by nearly $50,000 ($326,479.08 to $276,817.76).
Fifteen days after she lost the primary, Harp announced that she would be suspending her reelection campaign. But in recent days, a new political action committee (PAC) led by supporters Emma Jones and Alex Taubes has emerged to raise money for the mayor’s third-party general election run. ALongside supporters signing up campaign volunteers, the mayor has reminding voters they can cast their ballots for her on the Working Families Party line on Nov. 5 — and has scheduled an upcoming fundraiser, as paid for by her campaign, with Bridgeport mayoral challenger state Sen. Marilyn Moore.
Harp’s third quarter report summary features a negative number right in the center of the page: ($4,684.66). That’s how much money her campaign overspent during the month of the primary.
She started the month with just $8,933.75 on hand, and raised $24,185 in individual contributions, $7,800 in committee contributions, $250 in ad book purchases, and $13,500 from a loan that Harp made to her own campaign on Sept. 6.
After spending $59,353.41 last month, the campaign ended with the negative $4,600-plus number.
Elicker’s campaign, on the other hand, spent more than double than did the Harp campaign — and still ended the month with $20,828.42 on hand.
His campaign began the month with $108,091.35, and then raised another $40,429.01 in individual contributions and $2,940 from the city’s public financing program, The Democracy Fund. Throughout his campaign, Elicker has participated in the clean government initiative, which offers matching grants for individual contributions no higher than $390 a piece in return for a promise not to raise bigger amounts and a promise to forswear special-interest committee donations.
Elicker’s campaign then spent $130,631.94 in September, more than $71,000 than Harp’s campaign spent in the month of the mayoral primary, thus ending with $20,800-plus still in the bank.
According to the Harp campaign’s detailed expenditures, $32,976.49 worth of the mayor’s expenditures (55 percent) went to a Glastonbury-based consultancy called Mission Control.
According to the Elicker campaign’s detailed expenditures, $76,972.28 worth of the mayoral challenger’s expenditures (59 percent) went to a Manchester-based consultancy called Blue Edge Strategies.
Harp and Elicker weren’t the only mayoral candidates to file campaign finance reports for September.
Seth Poole, an unaffiliated candidate for mayor, filed a report declaring that he raised $2,555 in September and spent $1,652.79. Click here to read his full third-quarter campaign finance report.
Poole had previously missed the deadline to petition onto the Nov. 5 general election ballot as an unaffiliated candidate because he failed to submit 121 signatures to the city clerk’s office by Aug. 7. His name will therefore not be listed on the general election ballot. He has filed with the city clerk’s office to run as write-in candidate, and has an active Facebook account to that effect.