Frustrated, angry, and refusing to open their wallets—such is the state of mind of Democratic donors a year out from the 2026 midterm elections.
It's not unusual for the party out of power to have difficulty raising money. Considering the size of the shellacking Democrats experienced in the last election and the subsequent civil war that has broken out between the radical left and mainstream Democrats, donors are having a hard time justifying giving money to what appears to be a lost cause.
The Republican National Committee raised $10.7 million last month and has $86 million in cash reserves, compared with $10.3 million and about $12 million for the DNC, respectively.
"The gap is a warning sign for Democrats as some of their donors remain skeptical of the party’s direction and of whether there is a viable plan to win again," reports the Wall Street Journal.
Rachel Pritzker, wife of Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker and a large donor and head of a group trying to push Democrats to the center, said that radical leftists like AOC and Bernie Sanders are killing fundraising.
“They’re worried that the way the party looks and sounds can’t really compete and win elections,” said Mrs. Pritzker. “They’re worried that it needs to reorient toward the cultural mainstream and it needs to basically rebrand.”
"Rebrand"? In a year? Not likely. Not when the radical left's delusions about how popular their party is make it extremely difficult to shake the money tree.
“I think the Democratic civil war isn’t actually a civil war,” said Tommy McDonald, a Democratic consultant who works with progressives. “It’s just the people with the money are deeply out of touch with what the American people want and don’t want their party to do the things that win elections.”
Despite the DNC’s fundraising struggles, there is still money flowing to specific candidates and efforts. Some donors are directing resources to state-level candidates such as Abigail Spanberger, a moderate former Democratic congresswoman and onetime Central Intelligence Agency officer who has raised significant amounts as she campaigns for Virginia’s governorship. Spanberger’s ex-roommate, Rep. Mikie Sherrill, a former Navy helicopter pilot and a moderate, is running for New Jersey governor.
Both are front-runners—though their races have tightened recently. Victories in November would show some high-profile electoral success for the party, potentially boosting donor confidence. Several Democratic Senate candidates are also showing fundraising strength, including in the battleground states of North Carolina and Georgia.
“Democratic donors and others are pretty good at prematurely breaking the glass,” said former Rep. Steve Israel, chairman of the House Democrats’ campaign arm from 2011 to 2015. “A midterm messaging environment does not get locked in until three months before the election.”
That may be. But donors are "breaking the glass" because the Democratic Party has yet to have a reckoning about how the 2024 disaster came about. There's been no party "autopsy" that would identify where Democrats went wrong and how to fix it.
There's a good reason for that. The two principals most responsible for the fiasco, Kamala Harris and Joe Biden, are basically untouchable for different reasons.
Harris, the minority candidate whose campaign was epically bad, and Biden, the old warhorse who has yet to reckon with how the party turned on him, have unfinished business with Democrats. No one wants to open those twin cans of worms. No one wants to say that a black woman wasn't up to the challenge, or that backstabbing Democrats torpedoed Biden's campaign. That's why there's been no "autopsy."
A top official at a national Democratic group said some donors remain angry about how their money was spent in last year’s presidential election by outside groups, including on what they see as excessive salaries for Washington, D.C., consultants. The official said the party has failed to complete a public postelection investigation into what went wrong in 2024.
Pritzker, chair of the group Third Way, said, “It is shocking how little reassessment the party and its leadership has done.”
Pritzker is being facetious. She knows exactly why there's been no replay of the campaign to discover mistakes that were made and might be correctable. To do so would require an intense examination into how Joe Biden was kicked off the ticket and how Kamala Harris's campaign was so disjointed and uncoordinated.
Saying a black woman was incompetent cannot be done in today's Democratic Party.
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