With Donald Trump fanning the political fires?
Donations to Democratic lawmakers are outpacing the same to Republicans by roughly 10 to 1…
House Democrats are clobbering their Republican challengers in the fundraising race, dramatically reducing the GOP’s chances of winning back the majority.
The roughly four dozen most endangered House Democratic incumbents raised a collective $28.5 million in the last three months of 2019, a staggering total that is nearly twice the sum of all of their Republican challengers combined, according to a POLITICO review of the fundraising filings.
This drastic disparity, which House GOP leaders have deemed an all-out crisis, throws the Democratic advantage into stark relief: 32 of the 42 swing-seat Democrats raised over $500,000 last quarter and 36 started the election year with at least $1 million in cash on hand. Of the over 120 Republicans who filed to run against the so-called frontliners, just six had cleared that fundraising threshold, and three had that much in the bank.
“This is quite a wake-up call for Republicans — no way getting around it,” said Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.). “There’s no panacea in this. It’s going to take a lot more grinding work.”
Republican members and strategists, clear-eyed about the scope of the problem, describe it as twofold. GOP donors eager to reelect the president and fortify the Senate majority seem to have less interest in funding House candidates. Meanwhile, Democrats have turned the unprecedentedly high fundraising that propelled them to the majority in 2018 into a regular occurrence.
Buoyed by grassroots enthusiasm and the structural dominance of ActBlue, Democrats have moved the financial goal post, and privately many Republicans are at a loss about how to adapt.
Democratic incumbents seem to be picking up speed: All but five of the 42 most vulnerable members raised more in the fourth-quarter than in the third. In fact, 11 of them raised over $900,000 in the last three months of 2019; only Rep. Katie Porter (D-Calif.) passed that mark the prior quarter….