On quarterly returns

Pundits' Guide has posted the fund-raising numbers for the first quarter of 2009. And there are a couple of factors worth highlighting in evaluating the NDP's performance, which shows a drop from the party's usual first-quarter numbers over the last few years.

I'll start off by noting that the drop is probably less significant than it looks due to the fact that the NDP's focus was elsewhere for a substantial chunk of the quarter. For nearly the entire month of January, the party's top priority was to promote the progressive coalition in the eyes of the public and the Libs, which presumably left less resources available for party-specific messaging and fund-raising. So there's ample reason to doubt the significance of the year-to-year comparison.

What does seem significant, though, is that the party's effort to pivot from that point seems to have been less effective than hoped. Remember that immediately after Michael Ignatieff decided to prop up the Cons, the NDP responded with an ad campaign intended to start defining Ignatieff on its terms - and concurrently put out a fund-raising call to promote the ads.

One would figure that if all had gone as hoped, the ads would have inspired enough of a response to make up for the earlier lost time. But the first-quarter returns suggest that they didn't do much to bring in donations - which likely explains both the relatively short shelf-life of the ad campaign, and the rebranding work that the NDP has done since then.

It remains to be seen whether the trends from the first quarter prove largely to be blips for the NDP along with for the other federal parties. (And it's worth wondering how sustainable the Libs' pace in particular might be, considering that nearly a third of their fund-raising came from donors who are now at or near the annual maximum.) But it does seem safe to say that the NDP's most creative attempt to turn the outcome of the coalition into a fund-raiser fell short of what the party was apparently hoping for - and that will make it interesting to watch where it goes next to keep the money flowing.

Update: As a reader notes in comments, David Akin reports that the NDP also held back on its own fund-raising due to the provincial campaigns over the first quarter. Which means that we can likely expect a relatively soft second quarter as well, since three of the four campaigns involved are still ongoing (or just about to get underway in the case of Nova Scotia).