Carly Fiorina Surging Despite Lack Of Big Donors

Carly Fiorina is one of the presidential candidates many expected to appear on the campaign trail for a couple weeks, but then fade out of existence. Instead, Carly Fiorina might be seeing a bit of a surge in the polls to the point where front-runner status might not be far behind. The former CEO of HP is apparently making her run despite the fact that she’s still not seeing much in the way of big, monetary donations.

As CBS News points out, one of the reasons Carly Fiorina is seeing a recent surge is because she’s actually willing to speak in explicit language. During the most recent debate, which many analysts believe she won, Carly Fiorina made her stance clear by saying, “Vladimir Putin is not someone we should talk to.” Her specificity was in sharp contrast to Donald Trump’s repeated generalities about “fixing things” without saying what or how.

Carly Fiorina is likely having the same kind of success that Trump is because she is a political outsider. Also like Trump, she wouldn’t be an outsider had she won an office she previously ran for. In her case, Fiorina ran for the United States Senate in 2010 and she was defeated by 10 points. One of the reasons she lost that race, and a reason that still dogs Fiorina today, is the way she handled the merger between HP and Compaq in her position as CEO. The merger eventually led to thousands of employees losing their jobs, one of those employees ended up being Fiorina.

Carly Fiorina has explained the massive number of layoffs, in part, by saying, “When you have two companies that each employ literally tens — about tens of thousands of people — you don’t need two chief financial officers. One of them has to go. You don’t need two general counsels. One of them has to go. On the other hand we grew the sales force.” Despite the fact that she’s found some traction with her explanation, the money still isn’t coming in.

CNN.com recently talked about how the money really hasn’t started flowing to her campaign, despite some pretty good buzz. “Buzz tends to turn on the money spigot, and she’s clearly getting a lot of buzz out of last night,” said Ken Kies, a longtime Republican bundler and lobbyist. “But it’s probably not enough to fuel the tank to get you through to February.” We’ll just have to see whether Carly Fiorina can get that spigot running strong.

[Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images]