CARBONDALE - Green Party candidate Rich Whitney didn't have a lot of money to spend on his bid to be Illinois governor.

With about four months to go before the November election, he had about $860 in the bank. Compare that to the $1.5 million Republican Judy Baar Topinka had or even the $12.3 million in Democrat Rod Blagojevich's war chest.

In the months that followed, Whitney picked up several thousand more dollars, but his two opponents brought in several million.

It was an obvious disadvantage.

Looking back, the Carbondale lawyer said while money wasn't the most important part of his campaign, he wishes he would have put more effort into fund raising. Still, he finished the election with about 10 percent of the vote, assuring the Green Party a spot on the ballot in 2010.

Most would say you fared pretty well for the amount of money you spent. How much energy did you put into fund raising?

Not as much as I should have. The whole campaign is so overwhelming; particularly when you're trying to keep your day job.

As a third-party candidate, was it tough to convince people to give?

As a matter of principle for the Green Party, we didn't accept corporate campaign money. I'm sure there are some people whose calculation was: "This guy can't win, so I'm not going to donate." I think in this case, there were countervailing factors. There were more people that really responded to the message, as opposed to writing me off. They liked the fact that I was challenging the two-party system and in particular these two candidates.

So do you think more money would have made a big difference for you?

Certainly, if we would have had more money earlier on, it would have had an impact. For example, we actually cut a TV commercial. We actually did have enough money to get it on some cable markets, but we just ran out of time.

Now that the party has a spot on the 2010 ballot, what should it do next time?

I think part of it is going to be to look at fund raising more seriously as an ongoing obligation, particularly because we do have that handicap of not taking corporate money. The realization has sunk in that if we want to make a bigger impact, we're going to have to do more with fund raising. That just has to be seen as the necessary evil that it is.