Republican John Cox has raised an impressive $7.7 million to replace Governor Gavin Newsom, but $7.2 million of it came from Republican John Cox himself.

I am not a supporter of the lackluster campaign to Recall Gavin Newsom, but I do follow recall candidate John Cox’s Twitter @BeastJohnCox. Why? Because I am routinely amused by his cellphone photos of his “rallies” where absolutely no one is in attendance except the press. We will embed these throughout this post, as Cox’s inability to draw a crowd is symbolically consistent with his inability to draw donors. An SFist analysis of Cox’s campaign finance filings found Cox has drawn $7.7 million in donations, but 93% of that is just money he donated to himself.

Our inspiration came from a infographic in today’s Chronicle that shows the recall candidates' top donors ($5,000 and up), a list unsurprisingly dominated by Newsom’s anti-recall supporters in tech, real estate, and organized labor. But it jumped out at us that Cox was the top donor overall, to himself, at $7.2 million. “Wow,” we thought to ourselves, “Since Cox was the leading Republican recall candidate with a mere 9% in the polls, and this growing war chest, maybe John Cox is for real.”

But the war chest is really just his own money. Cox has given his campaign donations of $5 million (April 29), two separate donations of $1 million (Jan. 5, and Feb. 17), and a few thousand here and there on other days. Some of these are donations to next year’s John Cox for Governor 2022 campaign, for which, let’s be honest, this is all a name recognition play for.

According to the latest polling from the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies, Cox is no longer in the lead among Newsom challengers. He’s now tied with Kevin Faulconer, the former San Diego mayor, with both at 22%. (If you must know, Caitlyn Jenner is at 6%.) But the bigger picture from that poll is that the recall attempt is slipping even further, with 36% of voters supporting the recall, and 49% opposing.

The novelty question, of course, is who on earth is giving money to Caitlyn Jenner? Some people are, but they largely do not live in California. Jenner has received just north of $337,000 in contributions, and $210,000 of it is from out of state, likely because of her Fox News-centric campaign. But the biggest surprise we found in our research for this post was that another one of Newsom’s opponents is longtime L.A. billboard queen Angelyne (Warning: Link contains photos of 70-year-old woman doing legs-spread-eagle erotica shots).

Related: Brace Yourselves For a Rogues' Gallery of Candidates If Newsom Recall Election Happens [SFist]

Image: @BeastJohnCox via Twitter