Report shows Ensign’s campaign chest shrunk in last quarter of 2010

By Karoun Demirjian

Friday, Feb. 4, 2011 | 5:25 p.m.

If money follows power in politics, John Ensign may be feeling a little bit nervous right now.

Lawmakers had to turn in their quarterly campaign finance reports this week, and it looks like the Nevada senator's war chest shrunk at the end of 2010.

As of Dec. 31, he had $224,696 on hand — about $55,000 less than the $280,000 in campaign funds he was reporting as of the end of September.

It's worth noting that the latest reports are from the period that spanned the 2010 midterm election, when national Republican dollars were being lavished on Harry Reid challenger Sharron Angle, and state Republican funds were also going to shore up the Angle and Reid campaigns. It does not include any part of fundraising from 2011 — and it was only this week that Ensign headed over to the National Republican Senatorial Committee to make his official reach into the deep pockets in the party's Rolodex.

But weak numbers in decline still don't bode terribly well for a candidate who said last month that he thought if he could raise $1 million by June, he'd be well situated in his re-election bid. Ensign's political future has been anything but certain since his 2009 admission that he'd had an affair with a campaign aide; he's been fighting to reclaim his political viability as he fights off legal and ethics allegations ever since.

By comparison, two of Ensign's most widely presumed challengers-to-be are handily outdoing him: Dean Heller, Republican from CD-2, currently has $814,530 in the bank, and Las Vegas Democrat Shelley Berkley has $1.09 million.

According to those same latest finance reports, Ensign's campaign is also the cash-poorest of any Republican senator defending a seat in 2012 (others' war chests range from Mississippi's Roger Wicker, who has $402,771 on hand, to Massachusetts' truck-driving Scott Brown, who has about $7.18 million. Republican Whip Jon Kyl's fourth-quarter filings weren't available.) And compared to the Democrats coming up for a reckoning, only four-termer Daniel Akaka of Hawaii has less than Ensign, with $66,000.