On close competition

Alice has taken a thorough look at the 2011 Q4 fund-raising totals in the NDP's leadership race and mused that fund-raising may serve as a proxy for first-ballot support. But I'll follow up on a couple of points.

Let's start with a couple of reasons to take yesterday's numbers with a grain of salt. After all, they don't particularly match the one source of information we already had on exactly the same point, as Nathan Cullen's reported fund-raising to the end of December involved an extra 100 donations totalling $24,000. And I'm curious to hear how that divergence in reporting came about.

But even if yesterday's data is in fact the better source as of the end of 2011 than reports from campaigns themselves, it's still a month out of date at a point where the campaign is just emerging into the public eye.

That said, we can certainly glean some useful information from the 2011 numbers, as there's far more parity in candidate fund-raising this time out than there was in 2003. Five candidates look like they'll have absolutely no trouble raising something close to the limit, and Martin Singh is also doing remarkably well to boot - with only Romeo Saganash and Niki Ashton lagging behind what they might plausibly have planned for.

Of course, it could be that nobody is running up the score on fund-raising simply because there's little advantage to be gained in going beyond the spending limit. And if that's the case, then the theory about using fund-raising as an indicator of support will fall by the wayside. But if it's true that fund-raising can be considered a proxy for first-ballot support, then the 2011 numbers suggest there's little enough separation between over half the field to ensure that the winner will need plenty of later-ballot support as well.

Update: It's been pointed out by a couple of readers that there may be an explanation for my uncertainty above. Here's the part of Tobi Cohen's story that makes it unclear what time frames are covered:

Candidates were required to submit an interim financial statement to the party on Jan. 12 and Cullen was the only candidate who agreed to share some of the information, namely his list of donors, with Post-media News.

The disclosure offers a first glimpse into the sort of money involved in the campaign, as candidates don't have to publicly disclose their expenditures with Elections Canada until four weeks before the March 24 vote.

According to the data, Cullen received some 550 individual donations up to the end of December totalling more than $111,000. He's raised another $24,000 since, officials close to the campaign said.

The most plausible interpretation looks to be that Cohen's "up to the end of December" line - which I took at face value - describes what were in fact donations up to the January 12 reporting date, with Cullen then raising the additional $24,000 in the first couple of weeks of 2012. And if that signals a faster pace of fund-raising in the new year, then there's even less reason to think most of the candidates will have any trouble matching each other dollar-for-dollar up to the cap.