Madiosn Nguyen's Fund Raising Ability?

Last Saturday, at her new campaign headquarters in a building leased by Huong Le, the younger brother of Chieu Le (Lee's Sanwiches owner) who embarassed himself with false claims against the community in front of the city council, Madison Nguyen put forth an event to release her DVD.

The DVD is about her great accomplishment for the community in the last three years in office. There were about 57 people attending the event including the press and Nguyen's staff. At one point, it was emotional as her dad made an appeal to the community asking the community to help "correct Madison" if she made any mistakes.

The community is still not forgeting how Madison referring the Little Saigon supporters as "do nothing unemployed people" and calling the many rallies for Little Saigon as "nothing but a circus act".

Back in the crowd, her paid supporters like Viet Weekly (which pulled it newspaper presence in San Jose after getting downsize by the community in its hometown of the original Little Saigon), was walking about encouraging the 2 dozen people in the crowd to speak up for her. The guy with glasses kneeling in the picture is the owner of Viet Weekly who called himself Le Vu (LSI is not in the business revealing people's true identity and background). He drove all the way up from Santa Ana for the event.

This begs a point, why there are so many people from outside of San Jose supporting Nguyen?

From her 460 filing updated at the end of September, 80% of her money came from big businesses and labor unions, some as far as Washington DC, San Diego, Sacramento, San Francisco. Phoenix, Las Vegas, ect... The list is very impressive especially with the big name real estate developers and lobbyists.

She has raised so far $114,812 and spent $92,783 to thwart the signature gathering effort. She has now just about $22,030 left in her account. According to people inside her camp (specifically Viet Weekly), she is worrying that she might not be able to raise additional money, especially now with Mayor Reed abandoning her.

In a media war, she spent over $55,000 for all the radio ads, news articles and mailers, trying to deny the signature collecting effort. Of course, there were the consultant fee, the legal fee and the staff fee, that added up to another $19,000 or so. The problem for her is that she does not have a volunteer staff at her disposable. The passion is simply not there for the people in her District 7. But it is sure still with the people from out of town who basically are either being lied to by Nguyen or just wanted to see a good fight while getting paid. Capitalism at its best.

Her ability to raise money so far is amazing with all the out of town contributors.
Matter of fact, she raised almost twice the money than the recent winner of District 8 city council race.

The question is can she raised another $100,000 to keep her hope of retaining her seat?


Footnote: The Recall Team is planning a two day fund raising event next weekend with over 1,200 tickets pre-sold at $35 at ticket. The are expecting about 1,500 people at the two days event.