Minnesota Lawyer
Stewart Mills III
Republican candidate Stewart Mills III outraised incumbent DFL U.S. Rep. Rick Nolan between July and September this year in the race for Minnesota’s northeastern 8th Congressional District.
Mills, a first-time candidate and vice president at Mills Fleet Farm, raised roughly $244,000 in the third quarter of 2013 and has $234,000 in the bank. That was more than Nolan managed to pull in during the same time period. The Democrat from Crosby, who returned to Congress this year after a decades-long absence, raised about $129,000 in the third quarter. Nolan has slightly more in the bank, reporting $261,000 in cash on hand.
“This strong financial engagement signifies broad support from voters across Minnesota,” Isaac Schultz, Mills’ campagin manager, said in a release. “We are confident that as Stewart builds his campaign across the District we will have the resources necessary to draw a stark contrast between Mills’ job creating platform and call for smaller government, and the job crushing tax policies coming from elected officials in Washington.”
While incumbent lawmakers tend to outraise their opponents, the numbers aren’t shocking to most politicos: Nolan has been outspoken about his aversion to dialing for dollars.
Mills also has the personal wealth to back his own campagin. He recently disclosed that his stake in the family company is somewhere between $41 million and $150 million, and he earned somewhere between $4 million and $12 million last year. Mills and his wife both donated $5,200 to his campaign, the maximum contribution for individual donations.
Candidate money isn’t necessarily everything in the 8th District. Last fall, Nolan’s campagin against incumbent Republican U.S. Rep. Chip Cravaack attracted $9.3 million in spending from outside groups, far more than the $3.5 million spent by the candidate campaigns. The race attracted the third-most outside spending of any House race in the country last fall.
