June 30 was the last day for candidates running for congress and governor to raise money for the second quarter of this year, and now that it’s almost a week later, we still haven’t heard much about how those candidates fared. Why the delay? It’s probably because nobody is very confident in how their numbers will look, and thus doesn’t want to fire the first shot.

If a candidate had finished the quarter with what they deemed to be a successful fundraising period, we would have seen a press release by now outlining just how much money was brought in. Republican Marc Holtzman did this at the end of the first quarter, when he announced nearly $500,000 in contributions. Holtzman is expected to have raised enough money that he will be near $1 million raised, but if he didn’t get there yet, he may be waiting for the July 15 reporting deadline so that he can announce: a) how much money he raised in the second quarter, and b) how much money he has raised in the period since then. If he was over $1 million at that point, he could still announce that he had raised $1 million in the first half of the year.

The same logic applies for the rest of the candidates for governor: Bob Beauprez (R), Rutt Bridges (D), and Bill Ritter (D). All three are probably waiting until the reporting deadline of July 15 to announce how much money that have raised in total, rather than just how much they have raised in the second quarter only. If any of these candidates, as well as the candidates for Congressional District 7 (Democrats Ed Perlmutter and Peggy Lamm, and Republican Rick O’Donnell) had raised a significant amount of money in the second quarter, we probably would have heard about it already.