A TPM Reader has an idea …
Call your Democratic rep, senator, who have tons of money with no race. Ask them if they are planning to donate it to the DSCC or DCCC. If not, why not. Print their answers, phone numbers, emails, etc
This sounds like a good idea. 
Give ’em a ring. Most Democratic incumbents aren’t facing a tough fight this year. Some are barely in a race at all. How much should they fork over? A third? I’m sure.
Why don’t you ask? Give them a call and ask. There are well over two hundred Democratic incumbents in Congress. And it’s not like they can take a lot of time to think about it. We’re under three weeks till the big day. Time is running out.
Get in touch with your senator or rep and ask them. Let us know what you hear and we’ll share it with our readers.
(ed.note: Where to call? The proper place to call is the campaign office of your officeholder, not their congressional office. The staff at the congressional office won’t be able to give answers about campaign money. It’s against the law. The phone number and site of each campaign should be easy to find through Google. But if you can’t find it, I think the congressional office is allowed to give you the number of the campaign.)
Here’s a good question asked by several TPM Readers.
How do you find out how much money a particular officeholder has stashed away?
(What is this about? See the post below.)
It’s actually pretty easy.
1. Go to fec.gov
2. On the left hand column, click “Campaign Finance Reports and Data”
3. On that page go down to the second item which reads “View/Download Electronic Filings”
4. Now you’ll get a fill out form with all sorts of questions, state, kind of committee, etc. In most cases you don’t need to fill those out. Just go to the fill-in line that reads “Partial Name of Committee”. If you know the name of the officeholder’s election committee great. But if you don’t, in most cases, you can just type in their last name. And that will bring up the right data.
5. Click ‘Send Query’ and that should bring up a bunch of filings you can either download or view. You’re looking for the most recent filing. That should be at or near the top and it should be called “Oct Quarterly”. That’s the filing from October 15th. And it covers up through the end of September. In a hotly contested race, that number might now be out of date. But in one where the officeholder isn’t facing that much of a fight, it should give you a pretty accurate idea of how much cash they’re sitting on.
6. Okay, now you’ve clicked ‘view’ on Oct Quarterly. Scroll down to the “Summary Page” and that will show you a series of numbers. Look at Item 8, “Cash on Hand at Close of Reporting Period”, that’s your number. In many cases it’ll be hundreds of thousands or even many millions of dollars.
Getting this number is actually really easy. I’ve tried to be as specific and detailed as possible in these instructions to avoid any confusion. But the whole thing takes maybe thirty seconds.
Late Update: Turns out Chris Bowers has already done some of the work for you. He’s posted this list of 45 Dem reps who are literally running unopposed this cycle. Together they’re sitting on over $26 million. Half a dozen of them have more than a million dollars each.
Even Later Update: TPM Reader TP suggests an easier way …
The FEC.GOV site is archaic. Here’s a much, much easier way:
1. Go to http://WWW.OPENSECRETS.ORG. There’s a form right on the front of the page; enter your zip code and your representative pops up. Click on them and you get a summary page with their cash on hand, taken from the FEC filings.
2. Go to http://WWW.CQPOLITICS.COM/06map.html. Can you find yourself on a map? CQ will tell you whether your rep is in a real race.
My rep’s Danny K. Davis, smack in the middle of Chicago. Not a real race. He’s got $500k on hand. Here’s my question: do I call? What specifically should I ask? Durbin and Obama aren’t up this cycle. Should I call them? I want to help!
Rep. Weldon (R-PA) reveals secret source — an unidentified man at a gym named “Grumpy” — who says Weldon’s opponents are behind the DOJ corruption investigation that recently led to multiple FBI raids in two states.
Bush campaigns for Rep. Sherwood (R-PA), congressman accused of choking his mistress.
A fellow pro-torture candidate?
From the Washington Post …
A retired priest from Malta acknowledged today that he had intimate contact with a youthful Mark Foley in the mid-1960s that involved nudity and — on at least one occasion — “light touching,” but denied that he had “sexual intercourse” with him.
The Rev. Anthony Mercieca, in a telephone interview with The Washington Post from the Maltese island of Gozo, said he was surprised that his long-ago relationship with Foley had become linked to the former Congressman’s troubles. Foley, a former altar boy at the Sacred Heart Catholic church where Mercieca served in the mid-1960s, resigned from Congress after reports about sexually intimate electronic messages he had sent to Congressional pages.
…
In the interview, Mercieca, 69, said that issues like molestation and sexual harassment are “in the eye of the beholder,” and that Foley — who was 12 or 13 at the time — might have interpreted some of their contact “the wrong way.”
“I was a little out of myself there,” Mercieca said, from his use of medication following what the Sarasota paper described as a nervous breakdown. “The whole idea is . . . that I did something that he did not like, but at the time he did not say anything.”
Foley’s claims of abuse were treated with a lot of skepticism, given the timing of the disclosure and coming on the heels of rehab treatment for alcoholism friends and colleagues didn’t believe he suffered from. But it seems like he wasn’t making this part up.
No doubt the first of many GOP voter suppression operations to be revealed in this cycle.
DHS decides to extend contract wtih ‘hookergate’ limo agency.
I guess Duke and his pals still have some juice.
Yesterday, the Dems spent nearly $12 million on 32 races. See our rundown of the big buys here.
Come to Jesus watch …
Top Democrats are trying to convince two potential presidential candidates with flush campaign bank accounts to part with as much as $1 million each to finance the DSCC s late October effort to pull six Senate seats from Republican control. Sen. Evan Bayh’s 2008 re-election committee reported $10.6 million cash on hand through the end of 9/06. On Monday, following a conversation with Min. Leader Sen. Harry Reid, Bayh directed his donors to raise $100K for the DSCC and intends deliver the checks by the beginning of next week.
The rest at Hotline Blog.