Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale, D-Chittenden, has dropped out of the Democratic primary for Vermont’s sole U.S. House seat and endorsed a rival. So why is her congressional campaign still raising money?
“With your help, I will return to my platform as a State Senator with many more Vermonters in my corner ready to support my leadership and voice,” she wrote in an email sent to her congressional campaign list last Tuesday, four days after her exit from the most closely watched race this election cycle.
Ram Hinsdale is indeed now running for reelection to the Vermont Senate. But campaign funds cannot legally be commingled between state and federal races. And federal campaigns are supposed to stop fundraising as soon as a candidate pulls out of a race.
Federal campaigns that wind down are, however, allowed to keep raising money if they have debts. And Kate Lapp, who ran Ram Hinsdale’s congressional campaign, said the operation still has outstanding bills to pay, mostly to staff.
“I’m proud to work for a candidate who really lives her values. She doesn’t just talk the talk but she walks the walk when it comes to dignified wages — even within the campaign world — and that she is prioritizing making sure that we take care of our team as we off ramp and transition this campaign,” Lapp said. The campaign employed seven paid staff members, six full-time and one part-time, at the time Ram Hinsdale withdrew.
Lapp declined to say how much the campaign still owed. At first, she said it was her understanding that the campaign still had “approximately $10,000” in outstanding obligations but said she needed to check with finance staff to make sure the figure was accurate.
“Unfortunately we do not have a number we can share. Apologies,” she texted a reporter the next day, adding that the total would eventually become public in filings due to the Federal Election Commission later this summer. “Any numbers given yesterday were misread on my part.”
Ram Hinsdale outraised her opponents in the first quarter of the year, according to filings submitted to the FEC in mid-April. But she also burned through that money quickly and had about half as much cash-on-hand as her closest competitors as of March 31. (The next batch of filings are due July 15 and will cover April through June.)
When Ram Hinsdale backed out of the race, she endorsed Senate President Pro Tempore Becca Balint, D-Windham, with whom she had been jockeying for votes in the party’s left lane. Ram Hinsdale suggested that she worried a split progressive vote would hand the race to Lt. Gov. Molly Gray, who was considered the most moderate of the three high-profile candidates in the race.
“This was what many would call a jump-ball race, a toss-up,” Ram Hinsdale said at the time. “Anyone could pull ahead. Anyone could outsmart or outmaneuver. And I couldn’t live with uncertainty on Election Day about who would emerge victorious.”
Was running out of cash also part of the reason Ram Hinsdale called it quits? Lapp initially said that the campaign had been “looking at some data that showed that we needed to wildly outspend our opponents” and that money was “a consideration” but “not a primary one.”
But she insisted in a subsequent phone call that money was “not at all a driving factor” in the decision to drop out.
“I think Vermont is not a state where the highest cash-on-hand person always wins the election. So the truth remains that we really wanted to not wake up on Election Day morning with uncertainty, and we really wanted to do the right thing,” she said.
