Fundraising figures for the first half of the year came out this week, and they demonstrated a pretty big split in the Democratic Party. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) raised over $10.8 million from federally registered lobbyists, their largest haul from K Street in any six-month period on record, while small donors gave in droves to members of Congress who could be described as fighters, not folders. As the Wall Street Journal notes, “Among the 10 incumbent Democrats who raised the most from individual donors this year, six are members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus” (CPC).
This split explains a lot about the Democratic Party, and how a recent Quinnipiac poll found just 19 percent of Americans approve of the job Congressional Democrats are doing. The party is primarily driven by its donor class on K Street giving to it in record numbers, all while small dollar donors abandon the past pattern of just donating to the most competitive races in any given cycle. As big as that $10.8 million figure to the DCCC from lobbyists is, it is less than the $15.4 million Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez raised in the first half of the year, nearly double that of the GOP Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, demonstrating the upside of small dollar donations versus lobbyist donations (the DCCC shows this dynamic too with a net haul of $66 million, but they were still outraised by the NRCC for the first time since 2021).
Three of the top four Democratic fundraisers from individual donors this year are from the CPC, and 99 percent of AOC’s fundraising has come from individuals. She has said she will share at least a small portion of the money she has raised with other candidates, as she resides in a non-competitive district she should win easily. The Democrats need it, because despite the DCCC’s record six-month K Street haul, the party has been struggling to raise money overall. The Republican National Committee had almost $81 million in cash reserves at the beginning of July, compared to just $15 million for the Democratic National Committee. The WSJ’s analysis found that “the DNC raised roughly 20% less than it did in the first six months of 2021, a comparable period in the election cycle, and has in the bank a quarter of what it did four years ago.”
The behavior of small dollar donors is changing. No longer are they just blindly funneling their money to the most competitive races in any given cycle. They still are targeting important races, demonstrated by Jon Ossoff’s big haul of a $10 million fundraising quarter coming on the heels of $11.2 million in the first quarter, as the only Democratic Senator up for reelection in a state that Trump won gears up for battle. But Ossoff has been positioning himself more as a fighter in recent months, prodding the president about his Epstein connections while speaking about the need to dramatically change the status quo to the degree that voters are demanding.
The trend is obvious. Milquetoast Democratic candidates promising small tweaks to the status quo do not get the attention of individual donors, who are becoming more important to political fundraising as so much of it moves online. The capitalists who control this country have thrown their lot in with Trump, and while Democrats found a large source of funds on K Street in the first quarter of the year, their overall fundraising figures pale in comparison to the Republican Party enacting the agenda that American capital so desperately wants. Democrats have a clear choice.
Either embrace the fighters moniker and actually do things that don’t make 80 percent of Americans think they’re a bunch of useless schlubs, and be rewarded with an avalanche of small dollar donations like AOC, Zohran Mamdani and Jasmine Crockett have received, or continue on this pathetic path of complicity and cowardice where no one other than the most extreme Democratic Party partisans have any kind of respect for them, and get out-fundraised by the Congressional Progressive Caucus while they’re at it.
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