Numerous donors have stopped donations to the Democrat Party due to its weakness in the early days of the second Trump administration.
“I’ll be blunt here: The Democratic Party is f***ing terrible. Plain and simple. In fact, it doesn’t get much worse,” one major Democrat donor told The Hill, adding that the loss to Trump in 2024 was worse than the one in 2016 due to the Democrat Party being “so weak and so diminished.”
A second donor stated that “[T]hey want us to spend money, and for what? For no message, no organization, no forward thinking. The thing that’s clear to a lot of us is that the party never really learned its lesson in 2016. They worked off the same playbook and the same ineffective strategies and to what end?”
There is also major burnout among donors who don’t have confidence in the party anymore, according to Steve Schale, a Democrat strategist who ran a pro-Biden super PAC during the election.
“Frankly, a lot of donors I’ve talked to don’t think their voice mattered in 2024, so I’ve been doing more listening than talking,” Schale said.
However, Democrat strategist Jamal Simmons has a more optimistic view than Schale regarding Democrat donors.
Simmons believes donors will likely come back in due time, before the 2026 elections, as they increasingly see that Trump is against their values, and that their anger will lead to donations.
“For a lot of Democrats, it’s like we had a heartbreak and one way to deal with heartbreak is to curl up on your couch and eat ice cream," Simmons said. "But one way that will help them get over the heartbreak is how infuriating the new guy is."
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