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Money race: Trump’s slow start, GOP self-funders, and Democrats’ Senate firewall

THE SCENE

The first fundraising quarter of the campaign year is over, and a shrinking political map meant ever more money going to ever fewer races. Here are a few takeaways from the latest thick pile of campaign finance documents.

DAVID’S VIEW

Donald Trump narrowed the cash gap, but didn’t close it. Trump didn’t chase Nikki Haley out of the presidential race until March 6, and the RNC replaced Ronna McDaniel two days later. The Trump 47 Committee, created on March 19, quickly raised more than $23 million, transferring $10 million to the RNC. Big donors quickly donated to the new Trump effort, and they helped solve the small donor problem that McDaniel was presiding over before she left.

Republicans have not caught up with the Biden Victory Fund, which had the whole quarter to raise money, and took in more than $121 million — $90 million of it in March. But the reporting deadline came before Trump’s biggest fundraiser, where his campaign claimed to have raised more than $50 million, as big donors who had hoped for another Republican nominee came with an apology in one hand and a checkbook in the other. The Biden operation entered April with $155 million of cash on hand; Trump’s entered it with $42 million.

Senate Democrats are still out-raising their challengers. The party’s very thin path to keeping the Senate is built by tremendous fundraisers. Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown and Nevada Sen. Jacky Rosen both set state fundraising records, with more than $12 million for Brown and more than $5 million for Rosen. Montana Sen. Jon Tester, who raised less than $6 million to win his seat in 2006, raised $8 million in three months. The only Democrat who was out-raised, Wisconsin Sen. Tammy Baldwin, raised five times as much from individual donors as businessman Eric Hovde; he loaned his own campaign $8 million.

Democrats had an advantage in open seats, too. Arizona Rep. Ruben Gallego raised $7.5 million to Republican Kari Lake’s $4.1 million; Lake, so far, is the strongest fundraiser of the GOP’s 2024 Senate recruits. Former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan raised more than $1.9 million after announcing his Senate run on Feb. 9, more than any Republican has raised to seek that office in Maryland since Michael Steele — their last competitive candidate, 18 years ago. Hogan was still outraised by Prince George’s County Executive Angela Alsobrooks, with $2.1 million, who was helped by Democratic senators who’ve endorsed her. Hogan did outraise Rep. David Trone, but the Total Wine founder isn’t counting on small donors, who gave him a bit less than $220,000. He’s loaned his campaign nearly $42 million so far – four times what megadonor Ken Griffin has given a super PAC designed to help Hogan.

If you want to join Congress, be rich. The personal wealth of the GOP’s frontline Senate candidates has already defined those races. In Montana, Ohio, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, Democrats are portraying each likely opponent as an out-of-touch Gordon Gekko who doesn’t truly understand the place where he’s running.

Sure enough, the GOP’s recruits in those races put in a ton of capital to start up their campaigns. Ohio’s Bernie Moreno and Pennsylvania’s Dave McCormick, who both ran unsuccessfully last cycle, have put $4.5 million and nearly $2 million into their 2024 campaigns; last time, they loaned their own campaigns $3.9 million and $14.4 million, respectively. (Moreno bailed out before the 2022 primary, while McCormick has no serious primary challenge this year.)

They were not alone. Sixty-six Republicans running for the House had the personal resources to loan at least $100,000 to their campaigns, along with 14 Democrats. Most were not running to flip swing seats. The largest self-donation of the year so far came from North Carolina’s Kelly Daughtry, who’s competing in North Carolina’s 13th Congressional District, newly gerrymandered by the GOP legislature to be safely Republican. She leant her campaign $4.3 million, which helped her win the first round of the primary; she faces a runoff against Trump-endorsed prosecutor Brad Knott, who loaned himself only $530,000.

Kevin McCarthy was a fundraising dynamo. Mike Johnson isn’t, yet. When House Republicans threw their speaker overboard last year, some worried that the best fundraiser in their history was being replaced by a little-known conservative who had never had to collect much money.

This quarter’s numbers aren’t likely to quell those fears. Johnson hasn’t recreated McCarthy’s machine, though he’s built a smaller, bespoke one in a hurry. Johnson’s Grow the Majority, the fundraising committee he created after winning the gavel, raised $9.1 million through the quarter. That’s around a third of what Protect the House 2024 PAC, McCarthy’s old committee, raised in the first three months of 2023, fresh from the party’s narrow midterm victory. As Rob Pyers first noted, Johnson’s already spread much of that among front-line members.

The unwillingly liberated McCarthy has been doling out money to hurt some of the House Republicans who ousted him. Just one of them got out-raised by individual donors: South Carolina Rep. Nancy Mace. She collected $206,337 in the first full quarter under Speaker Johnson, about half as much as Catherine Templeton, who filed to challenge her on Feb. 5. Templeton got help from California Rep. John Duarte, and from 2022 Mace challenger Katherine Arrington. But the other seven Republicans who vacated the chair last year outraised their opponents, and Arizona Rep. Eli Crane, the only freshman in the group, raised more than $1.1 million.

Don’t raise general election funds unless you’re pretty sure you’ll win the nomination. The single biggest expense by the defunct presidential campaign of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was donor refunds. It sent back $6,476,803 to individual donors, and $11,400 to PACs; the refunds for individuals ranged from $10 for canceled automatic payments, to $6,600 to maxed-out donors who’d given to both the DeSantis primary campaign and a stillborn general election campaign. DeSantis told donors last week that he was ready to help Trump, who he endorsed as soon as his own campaign ended, raise money for the fall. He knows where to start with that.

NOTABLE

• In The New York Times, Rebecca Davis O’Brien reports on the “major Republican donors” who came rushing back to Trump in March, including Robert Mercer and Joe Ricketts.
• At CNN, David Wright, Fredreka Schouten, Alex Leeds Matthews and Matt Holt find a Democratic edge in House swing seats. Democrats out-raised Republicans in 20 of the 22 seats rated as “toss-ups” by the Cook Political Report.

Arizona. Republicans in the state legislature may put additional abortion measures on the November ballot, hoping to undercut an amendment that would add abortion rights to the state constitution. One plan, obtained by Capitol Media Services in Phoenix, would put a similar abortion measure on the ballot, with a name like the “Arizona Abortion Protection Act,” but with the ability for legislators to make additional abortion laws; another would put anti-abortion restrictions on the ballot. Neither plan had advanced by Tuesday afternoon.

Ted Cruz for Senate, “Democrats for Cruz.” Campaigns trying to persuade swing voters love testimonials from average Americans. In 2012, one anti-Obama super PAC spent its entire budget on ads that interviewed disappointed ex-Obama voters; since 2016, anti-Trump Republicans have found that their most effective videos starred disgruntled Republicans, the kind that viewers might have in their family. Cruz’s spot focuses on self-identified Democrats who now support him, including a county sheriff who Republicans have courted for years — and who joined Cruz at the State of the Union this year.

Gallego for Arizona, “Kari Lake’s ‘Great Law.’” Last week’s Arizona supreme court ruling, upholding the state’s 1864 abortion ban, rumbled Kari Lake’s campaign. In 2022, she ran for governor while defending the law and hoping for the end of Roe. She put together a new agenda for her U.S. Senate campaign — no federal abortion ban, plenty of local exceptions — but the 2022 comments were hoarded by Democratic operatives, and five of her quotes from that cycle appear in Rep. Ruben Gallego’s response ad.

Kevin Dellicker for Congress, “Kevin Dellicker for Congress.” Republicans have tried and failed to beat Allentown-area Rep. Susan Wild three times, twice with a candidate who’d lived away from the district and was vulnerable to “carpetbagger” attacks. In 2022, Dellicker lost the GOP primary to face Wild by 3 points, and his comeback bid is focused on one of that cycle’s issues: America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, which inspired everything from new “Chinese aggression” to the “surge across our border.”

The Biden campaign’s big problem with its chief opponent is, and has been for months, voter nostalgia. Trump isn’t popular, but the problems swing voters had with him have deteriorated in their memories; their memories of how the economy performed when he was president have gotten brighter. That’s especially true of younger voters. A plurality of registered voters under 30 say they haven’t heard Trump say anything offensive “recently,” and a plurality say they aren’t paying attention to his legal problems.

In Florida, voters can change the state constitution only if 60% or more of them vote to pass an amendment statewide. If Ohio and Kansas required the same supermajority support, both of those states’ abortion measures, which passed by landslides, would have failed. Gov. Ron DeSantis is bullish on beating Florida’s measure for that simple mathematical reason, even though the abortion measure is more popular than any politician in the state, himself included. A plurality of Florida voters say they disapprove of his job performance and Sen. Rick Scott’s performance — but Democrats fare even worse, with Joe Biden’s approval rating in the 30s and nearly three-quarters of voters unable to recognize Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, the favorite to challenge Scott this year.

Andy Kim (D): 45%Christine Serrano Glassner (R): 39%Bob Menendez (I): 7%Andy Kim (D): 44%Curtis Bashaw (R): 38%Bob Menendez (I): 6%The deadline for appearing on New Jersey’s November ballot as an independent comes up in 50 days. Until then, Sen. Bob Menendez can dangle the possibility of running outside his party, which he suggested he might do if he’s “exonerated” of new corruption changes by mid-summer. The first public poll to test this finds weak, single-digit support for the senator, but most of it comes from potential voters for Andy Kim — who Democrats see as their de facto nominee now that New Jersey’s first lady isn’t running. Menendez does best with non-white voters, carrying one in seven Black voters if he jumps in, taking most of them from Kim. That’s in line with what Kim’s opponents saw months ago, as white liberals rallied for him and non-white voters slowly found out who he was. But Mendenez’s own brand is toxic, and his son, Rep. Robert Menendez, trails in his own safe-seat primary, according to a super PAC’s new poll.

White House. Trump’s election interference trial began in New York on Monday, inaugurating a new and unusual phase of the campaign – one candidate in a courtroom during weekdays, one candidate on the trail. “I should be, right now, in Pennsylvania and Florida, in many other states, North Carolina, Georgia, campaigning,” Trump told reporters. He’ll head to Wilmington, N.C. for a rally on Saturday.

Jason Palmer, an education-tech entrepreneur who won three delegates in the American Samoa caucuses, ended his Democratic presidential bid on Monday and endorsed Biden. “He is a patriot and a man of integrity,” wrote Palmer, the first candidate to defeat an incumbent president in any primary contest since 1980. “We’re still in discussions and negotiations with the DNC and Convention leaders to determine our precise role at the convention and in the drafting of the Democratic Platform.”

Senate. House Republicans walked their articles of impeachment of Homeland Security Sec. Alejandro Mayorkas to the Senate on Tuesday, after a delay that their counterparts hoped would make it harder for Democrats to dismiss the case quickly. Every Senate Democrat supported Mayorkas’s confirmation in 2021, and the National Republican Senatorial Committee was already signaling attacks on red state senators if — like retiring West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin — they wanted to end the trial before it started.

“It would be the latest example of Senate Democrats’ enabling Joe Biden’s open border disaster,” said NRSC communications director Mike Berg. “Jon Tester introduced and effusively praised Mayorkas at his confirmation hearing, so it is clear where he stands.”

House. Virginia Rep. Bob Good, the chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, has spent close to $400,000 on “franked” mail since he took office in 2021 — an expense his primary challenger is questioning and criticizing.

Members of Congress are allowed to send official mail to constituents, informing them of their work, after a standing committee vets the content. (All of the mail is viewable online.) In January, a piece of mail covered what Good had done to “stop the record number of illegal border crossings,” with the phrase “For Congressman” on the other side.

“Bob Good has become a full-fledged DC swamp creature,” said a spokesman for Virginia state Sen. John McGuire, who’s running against Good in the June primary, after Good endorsed DeSantis over Trump for president. “He’s going after Trump and using taxpayer money to prop up his failing campaign. He should immediately return that money to the taxpayers and apologize.”

No other member of the Virginia delegation spent as much as Good on official mail; Democratic Rep. Gerry Connolly, whose spending was second to Good’s, spent less than $200,000 in the same period. In a statement, Rep. Good said that he respected “that other members may choose to allocate less of their budget for the purpose of keeping constituents informed of their actions on their behalf,” and that the mailer informed Virginians of Good’s “new role as Chairman of the House Freedom Caucus as well as what he was doing to battle the Biden Administration and reinstate some Trump administration policies that were working.”

• seven days until primaries in Pennsylvania
• 14 days until the special election in New York’s 26th Congressional District
• 90 days until the Republican National Convention
• 125 days until the Democratic National Convention
• 209 days until the 2024 presidential election