At the end of the last three quarterly filing periods I ran the numbers and put together the fundraising totals for the General Assembly candidates, caucus committees, state parties and other relevant committees, for example here is last quarter's.

For Q3 though I'm not going to do that for two reasons 1) money is moving so fast and so much of it has already moved since 10/1 that those figures are way out of date at this point so it would be trivia more than data and 2) so much money in those totals that looks like funds raised or funds spent was neither, it was just funds transferred from committee to committee which creates artificially large numbers. For example, the Governor transferred $20 million to the Illinois Republican Party who spent some of that and transferred the rest to the House Republican Organization and the Republican State Senate Campaign Committee who spent some of that and transferred the rest to their member committees. If you start adding all of that up it may look like $40 or $60 million raised and spent when it was the same $20 million moving around. The only way to correct for that is to pull up every expenditure for the quarter and go through them one by one to exclude the ones that were just transfers, a labor intensive and time consuming task that's a poor use of time in mid-October of an election year.

I do plan to do that work after the Q4 filings are in so we can figure out a best estimate for what this whole process really cost, it just doesn't make sense to do that now with so much financial activity still ongoing. It will take some effort but we'll know in mid to late January next year.