Ben Cline spends a third of his campaign money on the NRCC and a consultant: Analysis

The top two expenditures for Ben Cline’s 2024 re-election campaign are listed as “transfer of excess funds,” with the recipient being the National Republican Congressional Committee.

The expenditure amounts: $65,000 and $57,000 (!).

This is according to information from the Federal Election Commission, which reports that Cline has raised, to date, $654,586 for his 2024 campaign.

Meaning, he’s turned around 18.6 percent of the money sent to him by donors to the NRCC, to, theoretically, give out to other candidates.

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I stumbled into this finding after reading a story about Donald Trump, in effect, selling his endorsements to Republican candidates who booked events at his properties, and checked our local Republican congressional candidates to see if they paid up.

Good news to donors to the campaigns of Ben Cline, John McGuire and Bob Good – I didn’t find any evidence that your dollars ended up paying Trump for his endorsements in the Fifth District and Sixth District.

(Maybe Good, in retrospect, should have booked Mar-A-Lago for a fish fry.)

Something that I wouldn’t like as a donor did stand out: the amount of donated money that Cline has decided he doesn’t need, and decided to give to the NRCC, instead of refunding his donors.

Now, I can imagine the answer back on the ethics of this: people donating to Cline support Republicans, so flipping money that he doesn’t think he needs because he thinks he’s in a safe race to other Republicans who are in competitive districts helps advance the Republican agenda, so, all good.

Maybe, maybe not.

Could be that a donor would say, hey, Ben Cline, you don’t need my money, how about sending it back, and I can decide if I want to donate it to another Republican candidate, or I can go out and have a nice dinner with the fam, or, you know, pay rent and buy groceries, whatever.

I think it’s only fair to at least give folks the option.

Another thing that stood out, and I’m not picking on Ben Cline on this one, because I imagine this is an issue across the board – but, man, oh, man, does he spend a lot of money on “fundraising consulting.”

Laura Bell Consulting, based in Springfield, in Northern Virginia, shows up early and often in his FEC report for 2024, to the overall tune of $93,035 in the 2024 campaign cycle.

That’s another 14.2 percent of Cline’s fundraising haul going out the door, to a consultant on fundraising.

Between the consulting and the money that he’s giving to the NRCC, Cline has already burned through a third of the money that his supporters are sending him without doing a single thing to work toward his actual re-election.

This stands out because Cline positions himself as a guy who is better-suited than Democrats to spend your tax dollars wisely.

For a guy who wants you to believe that he’s tight with a dollar, he sure isn’t all that tight when it comes to spending his campaign money.