Christine O'Donnell Short on Cash

As she tries to overcome Congressman Mike Castle in the Delaware Senate race, Christine O'Donnell appears to be short on cash. According to a copy of her latest Federal Election Commission report obtained by The Atlantic, O'Donnell has $20,374 in the bank and owes $9,950.

Here's a copy of what appears to be her report: O'Donnell pre-primary report.pdf The O'Donnell campaign has not confirmed its veracity.

(As Dave Weigel notes, it contains a $549 charge to Mattress Giant.)

Castle, meanwhile, has $2.6 million cash on hand, according to a campaign source. The Castle campaign recently purchased $113,000 worth of TV time in the state, as Hotline OnCall's Jeremy Jacobs reported earlier this week.

Tea Party Express has pledged to spend around $250,000 on her behalf, and it's no secret that it, not the O'Donnell campaign, will be the main financial engine of her primary bid in the closing stretch. So it's by no means the end of the world for O'Donnell that her campaign coffers aren't overflowing. When Tea Party Express jumped into the Alaska Senate race, Joe Miller didn't have much money either, and look how that turned out.

A challenge looms, however, for O'Donnell and Tea Party Express: the most heavily populated part of Delaware falls within the Philadelphia media market, where TV air time is expensive. Tea Party Express says it's looking at air time there as it hammers out its media buy. Saturating this race with $250,000 in the final two weeks could have an impact, but the group will get less air time for its money than it did for the $580,000+ it spent over two months in Alaska, where air time is cheaper.