Republican convention delegates fired Diego Morales on June 20. Nobody bothered to tell his bank account.
The now-lame-duck Secretary of State filed his Q2 campaign finance report Tuesday morning — 168 pages, filed online at 11:24 a.m. — and it shows Morales sitting on $1,056,486.53 in cash with exactly zero races left to run. No debts owed by the committee. No debts owed to it. Just a seven-figure pile of money and a November ballot with somebody else’s name on it.
For scale: that is roughly seven times what Max Engling — the man who actually won the nomination — has in the bank.
Morales raised $65,048.32 between April 1 and June 30, all of it itemized, and spent $207,680.04 trying to keep a job the delegates took away anyway. He outspent Engling’s entire quarterly fundraising haul by five grand.
Where did it go? Mostly to BPM Marketing LLC of Port Monmouth, New Jersey, which collected $88,500 year-to-date for “communications” — $35,000 on May 26, $18,500 on June 2, and another $35,000 on June 15. Five days after that last check cleared, Morales received 134 votes on the convention’s second ballot. Somewhere in New Jersey, a marketing consultant is having a very nice summer.
The rest of the ledger reads like a man who never saw it coming. There’s $12,697.60 to the Courtyard by Marriott in Fort Wayne, dated June 24 — the convention hotel bill, settled four days after the convention buried him. There’s $9,000 to Indianapolis consultant Shaina Keck for consulting work, dated June 30 — ten days into his political afterlife.
The money kept arriving, too — and this is the part that should stop you. Morales collected $27,739.87 after the delegates dumped him. Thirty-one contributions between June 21 and June 30, which works out to roughly 43 percent of his entire quarterly haul, raised in the ten days he was no longer a candidate for anything.
Twenty-seven thousand five hundred of that was five checks. Chamos Electric LLC of Indianapolis wired $10,000 on June 22. Nicholas Whitney of Frisco, Texas sent $5,000 on June 23. Verde Management Group of Fishers sent $5,000 and Neurohealth Ltd. sent $2,500 on June 25. And on June 22 — two days after Morales was defenestrated — Nebraska Secretary of State Robert Evnen cut him a personal $5,000 check. Either the news travels slowly across the Missouri River, or professional courtesy among secretaries of state runs deeper than we knew.
The remaining $239.87 came from 26 small-dollar donors averaging $9.23 apiece, almost none of them Hoosiers. One woman in Liberty Hill, Texas gave four separate times between June 24 and June 30 — $10.41, $16.66, $10.41, $14.57. Nobody, apparently, thought to turn the machine off.
The Republican State Leadership Committee’s Indiana PAC gave $10,000 back on April 16, when the party still thought Morales was the guy. Todd Rokita thought so too, once.
That was true all quarter, by the way: $10.41 from Maine, $5.21 from Utah, $26.03 from Georgia, $1.04 from a retiree in upstate New York, and a $15,615.24 lump from another donor in Frisco, Texas. This is a national direct-mail and digital list, not a Hoosier one. Diego Morales was, functionally, a fundraising product — and the product kept selling for ten days after the factory burned down.
Now here’s how the people actually on the ballot did.
Max Engling (R) raised $202,745.23 and has $150,121.36 on hand — third place in a four-way field, which is a remarkable achievement for the nominee of a party that has held this office since 1994. Eighty-five thousand of it landed on June 30, the last possible day, including $25,000 from Rokita’s committee — the same Rokita who yanked his endorsement from Morales over “self-inflicted wounds.” Engling also loaned himself $14,547.62 to cover the filing fee. That loan is the only debt on his books, which tells you something about how quickly this campaign was assembled.
Beau Bayh (D) raised $557,972.98 and is sitting on $2,311,138.75. The Bayh name still prints. There is no cute way to write around a two-point-three-million-dollar war chest against a nominee who had to spot himself the entry fee.
Greg Ballard (I) reported $509,207.19 for the quarter on the four corners of his filing, though his campaign is pitching a $722,944 figure that folds in March money. Cash on hand is a thin $26,477.41 — he is spending it as fast as it comes in. And roughly 60 percent of his overall total, about $526,000 of $876,000, traces back to Hoosiers for Competitive Elections, a PAC chaired by his own campaign manager, Nathan Gotsch, operating out of the campaign’s Noblesville address. The roughly $395,000 Q2 portion of that comes from Gotsch’s own statement rather than a schedule, so take it as the campaign’s math.
Lauri Shillings (L) raised $10,766.89 and has $7,790.88, which at this point makes her the only candidate in the race whose finances require no explanation at all.
So: the Democrat has the money, the independent has the cash flow, the Libertarian has her dignity, and the Republican nominee has a personal loan and a $25,000 apology from Todd Rokita.
And Diego Morales has a million bucks.
