Earlier, I commented on the spin surrounding Mike Huckabee’s $500k fundraiser. As always happens with fundraising claims, the truth does come out:
About 27 people or entities accounted for roughly $450,000 of the total, At most 100 more people (and several couples were represented in that number) contributed the rest at $500 a head. This doesn’t strike fund-raisers I’ve spoken with as a broad or deep level of support from the hometown crowd.
But it gets worse for the "dark horse". If you look at the actual donors, they are broken down into a couple of categories. First, there are a couple of actual friends, like:
$5000 … from Mark Hammond, an Atlanta mortgage lender; from Don Houseworth, a Blytheville hotel owner; from Ed Ligon, owner of LR’s Orbit Valve;
$6,500 from Randall Sims, a Conway banker.
But most of them are people that Huckabee gave jobs to. For example:
$10,000 from Akin Industries of Monticello, headed by Mike Akin, who was appointed by Huckabee to the Arkansas Economic Development Commission and later the UA Board; … from Jerry Halsey, developer Bruce Burrow’s partner (Burrow is another AEDC appointee and his wife is an Education Board appointee); … ; from Madison Murphy, a Huckabee highway commissioner; from Sheffield Nelson, a Huckabee Game and Fish commissioner;
That’s not a sustainable fundraising base.
