DNC’s Fundraising Heats Up in June, Skyrocketing to Just $2M Less Than Half RNC’s June Numbers
Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett (R) and Chair of the Democratic National Committee Tom Perez (L).
In June, as a new FEC filing shows, the DNC saw an uptick in fundraising, pulling in a healthy $8.5 million to exceed the committee’s May total by almost $2 million. That brought them to about two million shy of half the RNC’s total of $20.8 million for the month.
With June’s numbers, the second quarter for Democrats wound up at about $2.1 million more than the Republicans pulled in… in June. Democrats overall second quarter wrapped at ~$22.9, close to just the June numbers for the RNC. The RNC’s second quarter overall was a whopping $51 million.
Some of the 2020 Democratic candidates individually saw their second quarter totals go up, and combined, pulled in approximately $118,130,500 between 20 candidates, led by Pete Buttigieg who topped the list with $24.8M raised.
By comparison, the Trump campaign’s second quarter came in at $56.7M. Double the top Dem, and almost half the combined Democratic field.
It is, obviously, a big difference. As Vice News wrote on Saturday, if the Democrats want to stop getting “smoked” in fundraising, they’ll “need to get their shit together.”
Because it’s not just about the top of the ticket.
The party’s current lack of cash could hamstring their eventual nominee and hurt down-ticket candidates, especially in states that aren’t presidential battlegrounds and are especially cash-strapped.
“This is a real problem that our party and the major donors are not facing,” said Nebraska Democratic Party Chair Jane Kleeb, who said her party hasn’t “received a dime yet” of money the DNC promised to them earlier in the year and hasn’t been able to hire field staff she’d planned on.
The party’s fundraising woes began long before DNC Chairman Tom Perez took over in early 2017. The DNC has been outraised by the RNC in every two-year campaign cycle since 2010, following a disastrous move by President Obama to spin off his own campaign into a separate operation, starving the party of resources for years.
In an email from the RNC sent out on Saturday, they included a graphic highlighting the difference in the June totals.
“In June, the RNC brought in twice as much money as the DNC,” they wrote. “Cycle to date, under RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, we’ve raised more than double that of the DNC and have no debt. Comparatively, the DNC is nearly six million dollars in debt.”
The DNC called their increase in June a “haul”, as did a number of websites writing about their totals. But by comparison with the RNC “haul” comes off as an obvious inflation.
There is a lot of time before the elections in 2020. But then again, there is apparently a lot for the party to do to “get their shit together,” as Hillary Clinton campaign alum Adam Parkhomenko, a former DNC national field director, put it to Vice.
