Cuccinelli Campaign Says National GOP Abandoned Them: 'We Were on Our Own'
We will remember in 2014!
Democrat Terry McAuliffe was always going to raise a lot of money in his bid to be governor of Virginia.Maybe Cuccinelli thought he was the Godfather, and big money donors were going to show up, kiss his ring and throw money at him. Unfortunately, as McCain discovered in 2008, that's not the way the world works.
But GOP candidate Ken Cuccinelli never took fundraising as seriously as he should have, despite knowing that McAuliffe's past career as a Democratic fundraiser for the Clintons would give him an automatic leg up, according to a Republican consultant.
Cuccinelli has paid the price. McAuliffe, who has a strong lead in the polls ahead of Tuesday's election, has crushed Cuccinelli in the money race, allowing the Democrat to overwhelm the Republican on the TV airwaves. McAuliffe's $35 million campaign haul is almost double Cuccinelli's nearly $18 million.
Cuccinelli, according to an operative with knowledge of the candidate and his campaign, assumed that conservative donors and the business community would automatically give to him, unlike Gov. Bob McDonnell, a Republican, who in 2009 "went out and met with and worked hard to get the buy-in of the money crowd."
"Ken wouldn’t stoop so low. He apparently thought that they would have to come to him after he became the nominee," said the operative, who talked about internal campaign details on the condition of anonymity. "I might go so far as saying that he had a sense of entitlement about it.