Longtime Brooklyn Congressman Ed Towns has just over $50,000 on hand for the 2012 elections, according to campaign disclosure reports released over the weekend.
Towns has always been a prodigious fundraiser, and his overall haul for the 2012 cycle has been fairly robust, pulling in over $250,000 so far this year, a decent amount, if a relatively low figure for a 15-term incumbent. (By comparison, fellow delegation member Jerry Nadler has raised close to $450,000, and is unlikely to face serious opposition.)
But Towns spent over $210,000 during the same period.
Towns is getting pinched on a couple of different sides these days. Assemblyman Hakeem Jeffries has signaled that he is looking into challenging Towns, and his daughter Deirdra, is in a fierce fight to keep in the family an Assembly seat that once belonged to her brother.
Indeed, in the last quarter alone, the elder Towns sent $3,000 to his daughter’s campaign and another $1,000 to the Democratic Assembly Campaign Committee.
Towns also sent over $5,000 to the consulting firm Penn Strategies, which is run by former Towns aide Shrita Sterlin.
Towns also paid out to several local Democratic clubs, including $450 to North Brooklyn Independent Democratic Club, $1,200 to the Seneca Club, $500 to the Stonewall Democratic Club and $500 to the Jim Owles Liberal Democratic Club.
Towns also seems to subscribe to the “spend money to make money” theory of fundraising: in addition to a number of fancy dinners listed on his filing, there are $9,000 that he sent to The Gold Standard, a Washington D.C. fundraising firm
