Chris Dodd’s Big Money Funders

Photo courtesy of flickr user Randy Bayne.

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You may have seen a Connecticut Post report floating around the Internet this morning that looks at Sen. Chris Dodd’s fundraising report from the first quarter of 2009 and finds that there are only five citizens from Connecticut who donated. Those five plucky Nutmeg Staters gave a total of $4,250. Dodd has a 33 percent popularity rating and is losing in hypothetical match-ups to basically every Republican pollsters can find. The citizens of CT clearly don’t want him around. So how did Dodd raise $1,048,674 in just three months?

As Daniel Schulman and I report in our story today, it mostly came from Big Finance. Here’s the breakdown. Executives and PACs representing banks, financial services companies, and real estate brokerages gave Dodd at least $299,000. (NB: That means the folks that Dodd, chairman of the Banking committee, is supposed to oversee gave 70 times more than the folks Dodd is supposed to represent.) Insurers and health care interests gave $48,000. And lobbyists, many of whom have Wall Street clients, chipped in $62,800 more.

So there you have it. It’s no wonder the folks that Dodd represents aren’t terribly excited about having him back. It’s not clear who he represents anymore.

Update: Keep in mind, there is a way to eliminate this whole money-in-politics game….

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AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

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