8/18 Pre-Primary/Pre-Special FEC Roundup

Hi everyone; sorry about the brief break to attend to some personal matters. I'm back and will be catching up in advance of the 8/18 primaries, starting with this FEC roundup; due to the brief and extremely unplanned break, I won't be putting the paywall up until the beginning of September. This roundup brings you a trio of Florida House races, as well as the special election to replace disgraced ex-Rep. Eric Swalwell in CA-14.

I'm most struck by the sudden flood of money in CA-14 for Melissa Hernandez, AIPAC's new favorite candidate (their super PAC has dropped millions to support her in the past week), but also by the frantic pace of Debbie Wasserman Schultz's spending in FL-20, a Black-majority seat that has virtually zero overlap with her current FL-23, which was destroyed by a new GOP gerrymander taking effect this year.

CA-14: Yeah, this is concerning for state Sen. Aisha Wahab, who is getting absolutely buried both in direct campaign spending and in independent expenditures. Wahab had a substantial lead in Round 1, but not an insurmountable one if Hernandez can consolidate Republicans and peel off enough Democrats who voted for neither her nor Wahab.

FL-20: Elijah Manley has once again spent more than he has on hand, which will put a hard cap on what he can spend in the final days of this race. Nobody else in the field of DWS alternatives seems particularly interested in catching up to him, though—that large cash balance has been sitting in Dale Holness's account untouched for months, the proceeds of an older loan of personal funds that Holness is evidently not willing to truly part with, and Luther Campbell is not exactly spending any of his 2 Live Crew money on his congressional bid.

FL-24: You'd never know Shevrin Jones was one of the frontrunners from the way his campaign is raising and spending, which makes me worry that GOP-friendly Miami-Dade County Commissioner Oliver Gilbert might snag this safe blue seat.

FL-25: Jared Moskowitz's insistence on repaying his own self-funded campaign loan is really something. Usually congressmen find it icky, at least in an optics sense, to directly pay themselves with donors' money; Moskowitz has no such qualms. Democratic socialist Oliver Larkin is running a real and well-funded campaign to take down DeSantis's favorite Democrat (Moskowitz oversaw the early days of DeSantis's COVID response as a member of his cabinet, and is the most conservative Democrat in the Florida congressional delegation.) With a little under $170K left in the tank as of July 29, Larkin's remaining money left on hand could be used for a late TV buy or some other late advertising push.