the
Sarah Rodriguez fires her campaign manager for what she calls serious
mismanagement
Sarah Rodriguez fires her campaign manager for what she calls serious
mismanagement
and suddenly the democratic primary for governor is all shaken up
we look at how the race changed overnight
i'm sorry i did not see that coming
i can i can i blame the smoke
the mic yeah i'm firing my campaign manager
Sarah Rodriguez fires her campaign manager for what she calls serious
mismanagement
and suddenly the democratic primary for governor is all shaken up
we look at how the race changed overnight and who's raising money in
the homestretch
this is inside wisconsin politics
i'm shown johnson here with zach seltz and rich cramer in ochlear hey guys
hello
so before we get started with our discussion here let's play a
clip from sarah regis from a press conference this week that we definitely
did not see coming last week
this was a press conference that she held on monday the day after she told us
that she had fired her campaign manager
uh this was over campaign finance reports
that uh she said showed that she had hundreds of thousands of dollars less
than she had expected she said she noticed these when she was getting ready
for her tv ad buy to start playing on the air
it never played uh turns out she didn't have the money
she was asked how she let this happen and here's what Sarah Rodriguez had to say
what i will say is this is that i met regularly
with my campaign manager about how the campaign was going
and based on the information that i received and the information that our
partners received it looked accurate
i trusted her to do the job that i had hired to do
that she had done for her entire career and i regret placing my trust
in that individual and sarah regis went on to say
that it was her campaign manager who had approved a press release promising a
one million dollar ad buy that one million dollar ad buy is not going to
happen she just didn't have the money for it she did
announce a new ad buy it will be smaller we don't know how much smaller
because she has substantially less money uh my question to both of you is
as we look at this race to me it feels like it completely
changed the fundamentals of this race Zach is that the impression you get
and my next question is why absolutely this has changed everything just a
week ago we were talking about the momentum that Sarah Rodriguez had with
multiple candidates dropping out endorsing her
could she coalesce as the the main rival the centrist moderate candidate in
this race that a lot of democrats were looking at
and that it seems to be out the door i was on the road this week following up
with the other four democratic candidates in this primary
and so i had the ability to be in a lot of areas of the state
where there were a lot of democrats who are still processing this this was
rank and file voters these were county members these were some elected
officials so they the whole strata of people
and for most of them it was how does this happen and the number one rule of
any campaign is you you demonstrate your ability to be
in executive by how well you run your campaign in the first place
and you often don't get credit for it but you definitely get penalized when
things go awry and when you're missing this much money and you are this far
out of the loop the number one question from everyone is
how did this happen so there are people that are reconsidering
whether they think she has enough votes to win a primary and if she's the best
candidate to take on tom tiffany in the fall from the democratic perspective
and it kind of has a dual firing squad purpose for her in one in that
there are people that support her still
but are more worried about whether others
still support her so they fear backing a candidate that's not going to win in
the primary so they're having to reconsider well should i go for my
next favorite candidate even though i still like sera rad regas
should i switch to a jul breading or a kelda royzer a mandela barns or a
francesco hong the other candidates in this race who are
looking to take advantage of this opportunity and pick up some of those
soft sera rad regas supporters yeah i mean when a big part of your pitch to
voters is that you are the candidate who can win
you're making that electability pitch as you hit the home stretch here
anything that kind of calls that into question
uh hit you harder than you might uh hit if you were just a candidate who was
kind of an issue candidate or a candidate who had
really solidified one section of the party
rich and what's your read on this why was this so big seemingly
and affect not only sera rad regas's campaign but everybody else's
well what we saw was it was a democratic primary that
was starting to get a little heated in terms of attacks toward uh between
the candidates but it was very muted and then it got a little hotter
um but this just kind of you know scattered blood in the water and
um democrats like mandela barns Joel Brennan killed a royzer Francesca
hong all of them really uh just went on the attack some of them got
very vicious about you know asking questions why how could this
happen just trying to keep it in the news cycle
some accused her of just you know bad campaign management or worse
it was really remarkable some of these statements that we've gotten some of
the comments that they've made um to reporters or in other forums
it so that to me is how it shook up the race
meanwhile um republican congressman tom tiffney who's
essentially unopposed um he's making a lot of hay of this as well
so i guess i'm wondering right now as we record this on a thursday is this
something where sera rad regas can kind of
pull out of this tailspin you know where people i guess watch this and think
hey that's a big deal but voters out there look at it and say
you know i'm actually not so worried by that there's a legitimate question
there because there's one tendency to think that oh well this is going to
evaporate all of our support uh i was at farm tech days in
stratford on tuesday and i ran into a gentleman who
said that his wife had already cast her absentee ballot ballots are already out
and coming back for sera rad regas and i asked him well does this
change your perception of whether that's a vote that you would have wanted to
make again he said absolutely not my number one concern is whether this
means she'll have enough money to do what she needs to do to beat tom tiffany and
win so this didn't change that particular voters
perspective last night i was in ozaki county which is
part of the old wow county it's one of those classic cherry red republican
areas that is shifting more and more blue lighter red every time and they had a
packed room and they had a straw poll all the members got a straw as they
walked in the door and they had the glasses in the back of the room so the
old-fashioned you see how your neighbor votes
sera rad regas won the straw poll in ozaki county that was on a night where
francesca hong was the speaker she was in the room walking by
the jars of straw she came in second but sera rad regas still won and some of
the same rhetoric came from the voters i talked to there
and these are core democratic county members they're they're proud to pay
their dues and get their straw to put in the basket for
for sera rad regas saying well my number one concern is whether she'll have
enough money and the campaign finance reports weren't fully out at that time
and right now it does not look good for her being able to get her message out
at all so that double whammy of it's the negative news cycles
and she can't get her own message through really does call into question what
happens over the next week especially as we know the market poll is
in the field or about to be in the field which will really inform and persuade
a lot of voters who are going to play follow the leader
who is the most electable who has momentum and if she had it before and
sees lost it now can she regain it so she is clearly looking
to regain it i mean it's not something where she just folded
after this press conference she made a point of saying this campaign is
moving forward which i got to admit when i walked into that press
conference i was not expecting that level of severity and so when she brought
that up i thought oh what what is going on here
um but like that she's it seems like she's trying to kind of
prime the pump you know make sure that uh that
nothing nothing to see here folks we're running a campaign we're winning
straw polls we haven't add up in the air look at the ad i look good in this ad
it's it you could imagine me in a general election
we're writing the ship on these fundraising numbers
um rich like what's the problem with that i guess
why might that not work well writing the ship
with a month or so to go until the primary right when candidates are
generally trying to put as much money into getting their name out as possible
that's the problem um so her campaign and and uh
Sarah Rodriguez they both seem pretty uh committed to staying in this and
they've raised a lot of money you know or they've been doing a lot of
campaigning they've been working with the owners to some
extent over the years so there's people who have already
committed to her candidacy i honestly have no idea
what will happen next i have seen speculation speculation online that
well if she can clear the primary the democratic money will come no big
deal but it's just maybe the worst timing for this sort of uh
news to come out from your campaign if you're trying to win a nomination
yeah i mean it does strike me that it is kind of a
multiplayer effect with the problems she faces
she could make a bigger case uh about why she's the candidate
uh you know drive the message with these tv ads
the problem is you she just can't afford them like that the money is a serious
problem for her in terms of being able to
to hit on that message and that could compound you know can
will donors continue to give her money she says they are since monday
monday uh that they've gotten more money but i think we have to see those
reports before we can just kind of take their word for it
at this point in the cycle well shod one of the things that's interesting is
we've gotten all the emails every one of the other candidates says that
this benefits them yeah and they're all trying to reframe this as now it's a
two-person primary and it's not the same two people in every given case
it's not even a clear front runner of who each one of them thinks is the other
major candidate that's out there but joe brannon says this absolutely
revitalizes his his odds of winning that people are now looking for a backup
centrist moderate with executive experience and
talking about his experience with the d.o.a. kelter roys was saying this absolutely
gives people a chance to look at her candidacy again and gives her momentum
and ela berns to the same thing and francesca hong just calmly just says
i've got a grassroots campaign that keeps growing and more and more people
see why she's a favorite for a lot of them but the question for you is do you
see any one of them that can actually claim to be able to take the most
advantage from this i think that's a pretty open discussion here
and especially within fundraising numbers we're going to get into it does
seem like when you mention the two candidate race
saw that term a couple times in their statements today
it is it is somebody plus francesca hong you know like they have sort of
conceded that she has the left wing of this primary
and that with sera red regas stumbling uh i mandela barns and the person who
can occupy that other lane or uh joe brannon or you know kelter roys they
all seem to think that they are in that non francesca hong
lane rich what kind of clues did we get from the fundraising numbers today
everybody had to report their numbers sera red regas all the candidates
for governor including tom tiffany the republican candidate for governor
what did we learn in terms of how much they raised in the first half of this
year yeah so this is the period between january
first and uh june 30th i've got my cheat sheet here
um the two top fundraisers were mandela barns and francesca hong so
barns raised around eight hundred forty thousand dollars in that period
hong raised around seven hundred nine thousand dollars in that period
but the others weren't too far behind so joe brannon
brought in around six hundred sixty six thousand
dollars rod regas uh raised around five hundred sixty two
thousand dollars with a big asterisk there
um not with the report but because of outstanding deaths and other things
um and uh kelter roys raised around five hundred twenty
seven thousand dollars so that's them's the numbers
okay so uh a delayed answer to your question i think they would look at that
and mandela barns would say in fact i'm the candidate who can benefit from
this and and you know and i'm the one who goes
against francesca hong kelter roys and joe brannon would say
actually our reports are pretty good and we didn't lose the 2022 senate race so
you know pick us pick us um so how about cash on hand
you know this money raised is nice but it is july and you need money to get to
this august primary yeah the one i want to get out
of the way right away is sera rut regas' campaign said it had
around thirty five thousand dollars in cash on hand at the end of june
that is a big problem um and also just to note they're
campaign reported around a hundred and fifty thousand or so in outstanding
debt so that would you know theoretically go against
whatever money she raises but uh i'm no expert with that
so francesca hong in terms of cash on hand four hundred eleven thousand dollars
kelter roys around four hundred six thousand dollars and joe brannon had
around three hundred sixty thousand dollars
one thing that was interesting to me is that
you know democratic milwaukee uh county executive david crawley he dropped out
of the race last week and he still had more cash on hand
than mandela berns crawley had three hundred fifteen thousand dollars
barns ended the june with two hundred four thousand dollars so
pretty interesting numbers zak as you hear the cash
numbers uh what do you think their interpretation of those would be i mean
do you hear a clear front runner just in terms of how much money they have in
the bank it's how much money they have in the bank and
how much is already committed to ads going out the door and whether that's
enough to actually change the position that they're in
i asked francesca hong about this last night i said what should viewers or
voters take from these campaign reports how should they parse
these numbers and she said the thing to look at of course favoring her campaign
he's she's figured to favor her campaign is that it should be
how many voters have given how much have they given
and she claims she has the most support from wisconsin that she has the broadest
support from new people coming into this electoral politics and that
some of the other comparisons are some of these other candidates are more
reliant relying on twenty thousand dollar max
donors that are tapped out that can't give any more money
but i think the bigger question going forward is how any of them compared to
tom tiffany and rich i'm sure you've got the numbers on him and those are
really striking in comparison to what we just talked about
yeah to say the least um i'll just toss both the uh the raised and the cash on
hand so during the first six months of this year
tom tiffany raised eight point seven million dollars
i mean that's light years beyond um what all the other them
what all the dams in the race have uh raised
and he also has six million dollars oh excuse me
of the money that tom tiffany reported raising um six million of that came
from transfers and at the same time uh GOP mega donors
dick and elizabeth uline and diane hendrichs gave about six million
dollars to the wisconsin gop so they're on
they're able to do those unlimited transfers but uh tom tiffany
he's spent a ton and he has six uh he's got more money on hand right now
than all of the other dams combined uh per the math i did
you know we just when you look at the democratic fundraising as a whole
those are not huge numbers in wisconsin um it kind of struck me
this whole campaign that if one of these candidates had
a big donor on their side who was willing to throw some money into a pack and
run some ads on their behalf god that that could seal the deal
and um lo and behold somebody is running a big
two million dollar ad for or against one of the candidates
it's uh targeting fritch hisco hong basically calling her
super liberal uh too liberal for wisconsin
but that is running ahead of democratic primary in democratic markets of mil
walkie and madison by a republican group
zach what's going on there well this is a similar group that's been
playing in a lot of these democratic primaries trying to get a more liberal
socialist progressive type candidate on the ballot that they think will be
easier to defeat in november it's a playbook that they've seen work in a
couple of races and fail and a few others francesco hong talked about that she
said she's more than happy to have them advertised for her she thinks she's
still the best candidate to win in the fall uh obviously the other democrats
are bringing alarm bells about that saying if this is who tom tiffany wants to
face then democrat uh democratic voters should be thinking twice about that
but i think the last thing that we should be talking about here is the democratic
primary last year said they were going to raise money for
the contenders whatever came through would have one of those big lump
transfers and what really stood out in this they've only got a couple million
dollars so they have not they're not sitting on six or ten million waiting
to dump into whoever wins this we're used to them being the juggernaut
yeah now all suddenly the the stage gop has united it's mega donors and
they're sitting on a lot of cash yeah so this will be a wide open race
whoever comes through this primary there will be a lot of ground need to be caught
up to to raise funds for the fall and i understand why they did it why they
kind of held their money through this period
but you gotta wonder if uh in the future somebody will question
why they didn't attack tom tiffany while he ran millions of dollars worth of ads
over the course of this summer it's an open question i mean we'll definitely
watch it and uh may have the answer in a few months
that's all the time we have for today thanks for joining us our colleague
anya vin wagtendank we'll be back next week
this has been inside wisconsin politics be sure to follow us on pbswisconsin.org
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