Democrats Relying on Out-of-State Donors

Most Democratic Candidates for Governor have high percentage of donors and funds raised from out of state, while Republicans are relying on donations from home

Democrats are overwhelmingly relying on out-of-state money to fund their gubernatorial campaigns.

Jon Baron, John King, and Tom Perez have over half of their donors living out of state. King and Perez are joined by Doug Gansler and Wes Moore having raised more than half of their total funds from out of state

John King is far and away the worst offender; King raised 89.2% of his total money and received 68.1% of his total donations from out-of-state.

Republicans, on the other hand, are overwhelmingly raising their money from Maryland voters. Kelly Schulz, Dan Cox, and Robin Ficker have all raised 8% or less of their total funds and 5% or less of their total donations from out-of-state voters, relying overwhelmingly on Maryland donors and fund.

If you rank the candidates by the total amount of money raised from Marylanders, it looks like a much closer fundraising race than it really is.

All of this data is skewed from two candidates who made massive loans to their campaigns. Jon Baron loaned his campaign $1,700,000.09 which accounts for 80.1% of his total funds raised. Take that into account and he too approaches 50% of his funds raised from out-of-state donors.

Of Robin Ficker’s total, his amounts to loans of $1,124,197.24, which is 99.4% of his total funds. Ficker has raised only $7,299.4 in actual donations.

Here’s a the full data for each of the candidates running for Governor who have filed their campaign finance returns. Data was not available for Democrat Jerome Segal or Republican Joe Werner.