Midnight tonight, when you’re celebrating, is the deadline for this fundraising quarter, so chances are, in recent days every candidate you’ve ever contacted has sent you an e-mail asking for money.

We can say that fundraising ability isn’t the best measure of a candidate, but it has some usefulness as a metric. A bad candidate might be able to lock up the big donors through connections, a famous name, or other advantages, but it’s hard to inspire ordinary folks to write checks for $25 or $50 unless you’ve got a bit of charisma and a real ability to inspire people. If a candidate can persuade ordinary folks, small donors, that the campaign is worth getting behind, he probably can persuade lots more folks to vote for him.

So if you have a favorite candidate out there, he or she would love a donation by tonight a lot more than tomorrow morning . . .