Wyman Duggan steps up fundraising, goes live on TV in HD 15

In House District 15, Rep. Wyman Duggan stepped up his reelection fundraising in recent weeks, and now has a new ad on television.

With a broadcast and cable buy of $45,000 a week, Duggan’s “Community Leader” spot is an aspirational half-minute ad showing the incumbent as a problem-solving pragmatist looking to fix the unemployment system and help the environment.

“Together, we can responsibly get our economy back on track, respect our teachers, and improve our schools. We can ensure we have clean water and a clean environment for generations to come,” Duggan, a prominent Jacksonville attorney by trade, said in the ad.

Unlike in 2018, when Duggan’s ads largely carried endorsements and third-person narration to validate what was then an unknown quantity, the candidate actually spoke in these new spots.

To fuel the ad buy, Duggan put his fundraising machine into fifth gear, with the $36,150 raised between Aug. 21 and Sept. 4 being his best fundraising period of the cycle. The Republican Party of Florida poured in $25,000, a nod to the Democratic lean of the district in terms of registration.

All told, Duggan has roughly $175,000 on hand in hard money, and an additional $28,000 in his Citizens for Building Florida’s Future political committee, according to records kept by the Division of Elections at the Florida Department of State.

Marketing budget is a necessity. The district is almost perfectly purple. Of the 103,293 voters in HD 15, there are 39,997 Republicans and 40,323 Democrats.

Over $1 million was spent between all the candidates in that expensive and nasty 2018 race, which Duggan won with just 51% of the vote.

The 2018 contest will not be so expensive, however.

Tammyette Thomas, an associate pastor and a regional trainer for Quest Diagnostics, won a contested primary in August, but is only now finding a tentative fundraising footing, with just over $10,000 cash on hand.

Most of her current holdings were raised in the two weeks ending Sept. 4, in which she brought in over $9,000.