Mitch Perry
Congressional District 13 Democratic candidate Eric Lynn’s campaign this week pooh-poohed rival Charlie Crist’s announcement that the former Governor had received more than $500,000 in his first three months on the campaign trail.
Crist and Lynn are battling for the Democratic nomination for the Pinellas County congressional seat that hasn’t been held by a Democrat in more than half a century.
The day after Crist released his fundraising numbers, Lynn broadcast an urgent email that’s language sounded dire, more so even than most candidates do at the end of a fundraising period.
“Unfortunately, we’ve seen an unexpected dip in contributions,” the email said. “For this deadline, in particular, that’s really bad news.”
Then there was this: “We’re going to have a tough conversation about whether we need to make cuts, or if we can afford to invest more in outreach and voter turnout.”
Cuts in campaign staff? That prompted a question to Tom Alte, Lynn’s finance manager. He said everything is A-OK.
“The fundraising pitch below is in reference to our January monthly fundraising goal,” Alte wrote in an email. “We have monthly goals to meet and we saw a dip this past week and are working hard to meet that goal like we do at the end of every month.”
He then added that since that email went out Tuesday morning, “We have already had an outpouring of support and are on track to hit our January goal because our supporters know Eric shares their Democratic values, principles and will fight for change in Washington.”
We’ll all find out next month how well the January fundraising went.
