Another day, another $117,000 in LIEs for Tom Daly!

Another day, another ungodly amount of LIEs — that’s “Late Independent Expenditures,” for those who haven’t been following my reports — coming in for Tom Daly.  Yesterday, the Peace Officers Research Association of California joined the fray with a relatively measly $15,000 contribution — but the big news once again is that the Fightin’ Realtors of the California Real Estate Independent Expenditure Committee (CREIEC) has added another $102,000 for more television ads, in their fight to find some way to stomp Julio Perez out of existence before he gets into the Assembly and starts setting a good example for people.

Because the CREIEC has been up and coming in the Daly-supporting sweepstakes, let’s take a look at them today.  You can see their contributors online, and you will probably not be surprised to learn that for the most part this organization is simply a creature of the National Association of Realtors Fund out of Chicago, which dropped a handsome (actually ugly, but in any event whopping) $392,836 into the groups previously meager coffers on February 15.

“The National Association of Realtors out of Chicago,” I hear you ask, because you are the kind of reader who wants to know who is jumping into our local races with the force of a herd of elephants, “who are they?”  I’m glad you asked!  It’s the trade association that has, literally, trademarked the term “Realtor” in this country.  (In other countries, it’s a generic term.)  What’s their political issue?  They want to boost the housing market by — wait for it — opposing regulation of the financial services industry!

That’s right — these are the people who don’t want to solve the problems of the collapse of the poorly regulated financial sector (and its mortgage fraud and foreclosure abuse, about which they might know a little themselves), and they way they want to do it is to dump literally $250,000 so far into making sure (if they can — and they can’t) that Tom Daly beats Julio Perez for a single Assembly seat.

I think that Daly has to answer for this.  Would someone with journalistic bona fides perhaps like to ask nominal Democrat Tom Daly if he supports the political agenda of the interest group that has now dumped $250,000 into the campaign to elect him?  Oh, and this is on top of the more than $50,000 that the California Apartment Association has put into his race.  Does Daly have any idea of why they love him so very, very much — more than they love anyone else in either major party?

So, for those keeping score — and there’s so much money flowing in that I could easily be making some errors, so please everyone double check:

• Daly got  $460,000 from Chevron’s JOBSPAC.
• Daly now has $200,000 from Realtors and landlords.
• Daly now has $15,000 from cops.
• The doctors and health insurers lobbies plopped down over $40,000 more in LIEs against Julio.

That’s about $675,000 , or actually $715,000, for Daly

This compares to $160,000 for Julio Perez and $34,000 in LIEs specifically attacking him.

I think that Michele Martinez is at $2,000.

So that’s over $700,000 in LIEs to $126,000 for Julio (although, again, negative ads are more powerful than positive ones, so the net value of the ads is more like $70,000), which is a ratio of over 6.5 to 1 — or even 10 to 1.

You know, they can’t elect Tom Daly in June.  Julio is going to finish second — and he’s going to have five months to ask Daly why he’s the kind of guy that these 1%ers love?  They would have been smarter to rein in their fire.  And with one group putting in $460,000 and another $200,000, they really can’t argue that it was a problem due to lack of coordination.

Here’s an opposing view for your amusement, though: Art Pedroza is sticking to his guns!  From Tuesday:

We might see two Democrats emerge in the 69th Assembly District, out of a total of four Democrats in the race.  The top two Democrats are Orange County Clerk-Recorder Tom Dalyand Santa Ana Council Member Michele Martinez.  The other two Democrats, Julio Perezand Francisco Barragan, are totally unknown.  Perez has been mailing two to three mailers a day but all of that is unlikely to move him out of fourth place as his politics are too far left and the voters never heard of him.  A lone Republican candidate, Jose “Joe” Moreno, does not have the backing of his party, but he could supplant Daly as one of the “top two,” simply by virtue of his partisan registration.

If Martinez makes the “top two” in the 69th A.D., she will easily win in the general election, as the 69th A.D. has a Latino voter majority.  This is why Daly, and Perez, are spending a fortune now – for them this is their only shot at advancing and having a chance to win in this district.

Yeah, right — the oil and tobacco companies, the Realtors and landlords, the doctors and health insurers, and now the cops are spending over $700,000 because they’re afraid of Michele Martinez?  Why bother?