A follow up to my earlier post about the Senatorial electoral landscape...

Here's evidence of Republican spin regarding the topic of out of state Senate campaign finances... and you can check my math on this.

Go to the Political Money Line website ((link...)) and look at FEC reported campaign contributions for the 2006 cycle in Tennessee.

Now, extract the information from that page, excluding the in-state candidates.

Lookee there: For the latest fundraising data available, out-of-state Republicans are out-fundraising out-of-state Democrats by more than 2:1. Democratic candidates on the national scene (other than Harold Ford and Rosalind Kurita) have raised a total of $217,892 to date, while the Republican campaigns have extracted $537,237 from Tennessee. The average donation for Dem candidates is $5736, while the average donation for GOPers is $11,938. Republicans also maintain substantial edge in number of donors, 422 to 269.

The single biggest fundraiser? Rick "Man-on-Dog" Santorum, whose campaign has raised nearly $100,000. In Tennessee.

So. The GOP is raising bigger bucks from a greater number of donors (AND maintaining a higher -- read: double -- per-donation margin) for races happening outside of Tennessee, and they somehow think that Ford is out of line, out of touch, and an elitist/pimp jerk for pulling in donations from the likes of Magic Johnson?

OK, then.