Challengers are trying to use the hot-button issue to frame their opponents. | REUTERS SOPA stirs passion, not donations

House candidates riding a wave of anti-SOPA sentiment to help fuel their campaigns are facing a harsh reality: It’s done little to pad their coffers.

Federal Election Commission data released this week show that candidates who are trying to unseat several House incumbents who supported Stop Online Piracy Act aren’t getting much in the way of financial help from the legion of Internet activists whose opposition killed the bill.


Take Karen Kwiatkowski. She’s challenging Rep. Bob Goodlatte — who was one of the most vocal SOPA co-sponsors from his perch on the House Judiciary panel — in Virginia’s 6th Congressional District primary.

At the height of the SOPA debate earlier this year, the Air Force veteran turned political hopeful criticized the anti-piracy legislation on her website as a tool that would “dramatically increase the federal government’s role in our lives.” To hammer home the point, she asked supporters to contribute to her campaign to “send Bob Goodlatte a message.”

That message, however, basically fell flat — Kwiatkowski estimates she raked in only about $5,000 from SOPA haters between Jan. 1 and March 31.

“It hasn’t been a huge money generator,” she told POLITICO.

It’s a stretch to think that any of the longtime incumbents who backed SOPA will lose their seats as a result.

But challengers are trying to use the hot-button issue to frame their opponents who supported the anti-piracy measure as backers of Big Government — a move intended to help raise campaign cash by seizing on the hot topic of the day. The critics that darkened websites and flooded lawmakers with phone calls, emails and social media messages, however, apparently haven’t opened their wallets.

For her part, Kwiatkowski says SOPA was never the lead issue for her campaign, “and we really never leveraged it that way.”

SOPA, however, is a top priority in Texas Republican Rep. Lamar Smith’s primary race: A recently posted digital billboard along a major San Antonio highway encourages folks to vote against Smith, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, for sponsoring the bill.

Smith is facing two GOP challengers looking to specifically milk SOPA for all it’s worth. But there’s no sign that the tactic is paying off financially in the Lone Star State.

Former Arizona sheriff Richard Mack, one of Smith’s challengers, raised only $25,289 during the period between January and March, a fraction of the more than $200,000 Smith pumped into his coffers during the same period.

Mack acknowledges that contributions based on SOPA have been slow to trickle in so far. But he said he recently met with executives from an Austin-based data center operator that “feels totally betrayed by Lamar Smith” and has “made some big pledges.”

“We don’t have the money necessarily we were hoping to get by now,” Mack said. “But it’s been increasing quite a bit in the last couple of weeks.”

Smith’s other GOP challenger is Richard Morgan, a software engineer who filed his candidate paperwork with the Federal Election Commission late last month. He’s raised little cash so far, but said he received about $1,300 in contributions after he posted a short write-up on Reddit.

“The big money is going to come from the big PACs like Google and Facebook,” Morgan said. “We haven’t pursued those heavy hitters yet.”

Tennessee Republican Rep. Marsha Blackburn was also targeted for her support of SOPA. Her challenger, Jack Arnold, demonized SOPA as giving “unheard-of censorship power to the Department of Justice.”

But Arnold had raised only $3,795 during the reporting period as of March 1, according to a Facebook post on his campaign account. Arnold’s most recent disclosure was not available on the FEC website as of late Monday.

One candidate who has gotten possibly the most mileage from his anti-SOPA position is Rob Zerban, a Democrat who is challenging House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan in Wisconsin.

Critics pounced after Ryan issued a vague statement that they interpreted as supportive of the bill and they launched an online campaign — dubbed “ Operation Pull Ryan” — to unseat him.

Zerban’s been able to use that to his advantage. He pulled in roughly $318,000 in contributions between January and March, and his campaign staff estimates about $20,000 of that came from the anti-SOPA crowd. According to FEC records, that includes donations from software engineers at Google, HP, Amazon and mSpot, a music-streaming service that opposed SOPA.

“This is not a bunch of lobbyists connected to Silicon Valley. This is people on the Internet chipping in a couple of bucks,” said Tyler Norkus, Zerban’s deputy campaign manager. “SOPA and the debate around it helped bring in a lot of new people and those people are staying involved.”