Orange County Register

Challengers in Orange County’s three potentially competitive 2010 Congressional races have each raised serious cash - but all still trail the incumbents significantly at the money game, according to disclosures filed with the Federal Elections Commission on Wednesday.

Democrat Bill Hedrick came within 2.4 percent of upsetting Rep. Ken Calvert, R-Corona, last year despite being outraised 5-1. This time, he’s more than halfway to the nearly $200,000 raised for the 2008 contest, having brought in $107,000. He’s spent all but $66,000 of it, while Calvert has raised $540,000 and still has $385,000.

But as Hedrick showed last year, there’s more to the races than money … and there’s still a lot of time for shoring up the bank accounts. That applies to a couple other races as well, although we can probably expect the incumbents to for the typical track and remain ahead in fundraising.

As mentioned previously, GOP challenger Van Tran has raised an impressive $254,000 in six weeks and has all but $4,000 of that still in the bank. But Sanchez raised $242,000 in the last quarter, bringing her available cash total to $714,000. (She has the luxury of rolling over money from her last campaign.)

There’s still an outside chance Sanchez could run for governor rather than seek reelection. Click here for more on that.

Also mentioned previously was that Democrat Beth Krom, an Irvine councilwoman, said in April that she wanted to raise $250,000 by midyear to prove that she was for real in her challenge of Rep. John Campbell. However, the accidental death of her 22-year-old son in June became a more immediate issue in her life. Click here to read about Noah Krom and his accident.

Krom ended up raising $139,000 and after expenses, she now has $98,000 left. Campbell has raised $283,000 this election cycle - that gets added to money left over from the last cycle for a total of $470,000 if cash on hand.

Campbell won reelection easily last year but Barack Obama also won in the district, showing voters’ willingness to cross the aisle there.

You can see all of the congressional disclosures in detail for by clicking here and typing the candidate’s name in the “committee name” box.

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