October 18, 2005

Money Matters

Voters will go to the polls three weeks from today, and the campaign season will come to an end. Until then, the money keeps rolling in.

As a snapshot, take campaign finance reports filed yesterday. Some quick math shows that, all told, political committees duking it out over the eight initiatives reported a total of about $1.65 million in contributions.

And that’s just the filings for Monday.

Most of that amount was given to committees battling Governor Schwarzenegger, including more money from both the California Teachers Association (about $90,000) and the California Correctional Peace Officers Association (about $130,000).

A couple of other contributions to the anti-Arnold efforts seem worth noting. First, a $100,000 check from Zenith Insurance was sent to the committee controlled by Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez. Zenith’s chairman is Stanley Zax, who has been a Schwarzenegger campaign contributor in the past.

Also noteworthy was a $2000 check in opposition to Proposition 77 from Aaron Sorkin, creator of NBC’s “The West Wing.”

The governor’s California Recovery Team reported just $4000 in contributions for Monday’s filing, including $2000 from Nobel laureate economist Milton Friedman. While that may not be much for one day’s work, the CRT has been pretty successful of late, with almost a whopping $10 million in contributions in just the last two weeks– $3 million of that from Schwarzenegger himself.