Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL), the fiery liberal best known for his insults and punchlines against the Republicans, has sure been able to parlay his notoriety into financial support.
The Orlando Sentinel reports that Grayson’s campaign expects to report raising an astonishing $803,000 in the first quarter of 2010, and that he has $1.5 million on hand. (Over half appears to have come from a March 27 money-bomb online fundraiser, which took in $470,000.) Grayson’s campaign said that the donations came from approximately 25,000 individual donors, with an average contribution of $32.
Beyond his grassroots fundraising, it should also be noted that Grayson himself is a multi-millionaire, and self-financed his 2008 campaign with about $2.6 million of his own money. But he could very well end up needing all of those small donors plus some of his own cash, hailing from a swing district that voted narrowly for Barack Obama in 2008, after a previous history of supporting Republicans.
