The bruising primary season drained cash from three of the candidates for Erie County sheriff, leaving each with less than $5,000 in his or her campaign bank account as of a few days ago.
Democrat Kimberly Beaty and Republican John C. Garcia will benefit from whatever assistance their parties want to provide heading into November, since the two won their primaries.
But Beaty’s campaign account held just $4,842 as of Sunday, and Garcia’s held $3,982, according to their statements filed Thursday with the state Board of Elections. Karen Healy-Case, who lost the Republican primary to Garcia but holds the Conservative Party line, had just $3,725.
All are likely to ramp up fundraising efforts because candidates running countywide in upstate New York’s most populous county can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars, especially if they lack name recognition.
People are also reading…
In his final race in 2017, the well-known sheriff, Timothy B. Howard, spent more than $280,000 after mid-July to squeak out a razor-thin victory on Election Day.
Howard has decided not to seek another term and a cluster of candidates entered the race to succeed him. The field has since narrowed to four: Beaty, the public safety director at Canisius College; Garcia, a retired Buffalo police detective; Healy-Case, who also is retired from the Buffalo Police Department and, like Garcia, works in private security; and Ted DiNoto, an Amherst police lieutenant.
DiNoto, a Republican running on an independent line, did not need to finance a primary race. His campaign account held $74,259 on Sunday, which included the $50,000 that his household has loaned the effort.
Party primaries are held earlier in the year now, in June as opposed to September when Erie County voters last selected a sheriff. This year’s primaries featured a blitz of spending, mostly on mailers and TV advertising, before Beaty and Garcia wrestled their major-party nominations away from the candidates favored by the party establishments. The GOP leadership had endorsed Healy-Case, and the Democrats had endorsed Brian J. Gould, the assistant police chief in Cheektowaga.
From June 7-July 11, a roughly one-month period that takes in an 11-day sprint to Primary Day, Healy-Case spent $91,300, according to her report to the Elections Board. Garcia spent $68,117, and Beaty almost $58,000.
