Just hours after the No On One side filed its spending report and issued a press release touting the $2.7 million it has raised so far, Marc Mutty of Stand for Marriage Maine put out an urgent plea via email. In it he said Yes On One was "in desperate need of additional financial support" or at risk of losing the campaign to repeal Maine's same-sex marriage law.
"We're not meeting our budget, our budget projections," Mutty says. "We certainly had to cut back on our presence on television and radio because of the budget shortfalls, and we had planned a bus tour, much like candidates do, where we would go from city to city, and we had to cancel that because that's an expensive proposition which we just can't afford at this point."
The campaign finance report shows Stand for Marriage trailing opponents in fundraising by $1.6 million. The report also shows that the campaign is amassing a debt of several hundred thousand dollars.
"I would not be at all surprised if the Yes On One side, the people who want to repeal same-sex marriage, are having a very good fundraising day today," says Mark Brewer, an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Maine. "As kind of the news of the size of this differential in money gets out there, as news about the size of the debt gets out there, that maybe some people and some groups with some relatively deep pockets, might be digging a little deeper today or digging for the first time."
Brewer says he's surprised by the size of the fundraising margin between same-sex marriage supporters and opponents. And he's also a bit surprised that Stand for Marriage trails in individual donors.
While No On One/Support Maine Equality boasts of having 12,000 individual donors, with a little more than half from out of state, Yes On One/Stand for Marriage is relying on several large organizations to provide most of its funding: the New Jersey-based National Organization for Marriage, already under scrutiny by the Maine Ethics Commission for the source of its donations, has contributed more than $500,000 to the campaign so far; the Roman Catholic Diocese of Portland has given more than $300,000 and Colorado-based Focus on the Family has raised about $90,000.
Campaign Chair Marc Mutty says there's a reason more individual donors aren't coming forward. "People contributing to our campaign or people contemplating, are very concerned about anonymity, and of course we can't guarantee that if it's over $50, and they re-think their donation at that point."
Mutty says the fear is that they or their businesses will be targeted by opponents, although no examples have been made public. Professor Brewer says he thinks Maine's economy may be playing more of a role, with those who oppose same-sex marriage in rural Maine simply unable to afford to make donations.
Brewer says the current deficit is a problem for the repeal effort, but not an insurmountable one. He says the most crucial factor for either side is mobilizing voters on election day.