Bill Reineke gets creative to hide weak fundraising numbers

Wednesday, July 31 at midnight was the semiannual campaign finance filing deadline. This deadline requires candidates for office to report all contributions and expenditures through June 30th of 2019.

Melissa Ackison (R-Marysville)’s opponent for the 26th district Ohio Senate seat, Columbus insider Bill Reineke (R-Tiffin), released a statement touting that he raised $150,000 during this reporting period.

However, upon close inspection of his report it’s clear that Mr. Reineke got creative with what he chose to report as it pertains to the contributions he received. 

As just mentioned, candidates are required to report their contributions up to and through June 30th. If you sort Reineke’s contributions by date, he actually only raised just over $56,000 prior to June 30th.

That’s almost $100,000 less than he claimed to have raised during this reporting period. For a sitting State Representative, $56,000 is not an impressive number to say the least.

In order to throw up a smoke screen and create the illusion that he had more fundraising success, he elected to also report all of his contributions from the month of July. 

Is this surprising? No.

Bill Reineke has proven himself to be someone who more often than not shies away from telling the truth. 

The scene in the Reineke camp must have been chaotic when they realized the low number that they were going to have to report.

So what did they do?

Reineke did what he does best and went to the Columbus insiders to bail him out. He raised a total of roughly $44,500 from PACs throughout the entire reporting period. Over $43,600 of that came in the month of July alone. 

“The numbers don’t lie,” said Melissa Ackison in regards to Reineke’s report. “It’s clear he received a bailout from Columbus insiders in order to report a higher number. Reineke is trying to use this report as a chance to puff out his chest, but in reality this was nothing more than a paper tiger. Nice try, Bill.” 

The 26th Ohio Senate district includes all or part of Seneca, Sandusky, Morrow, Marion, Union, Crawford, and Wyandot counties.