With two weeks to go until the midterm election, Democrats are desperate for cash to make their closing arguments to voters and try to shore up even what should be the safest of Democrat House seats.
As Townhall reported earlier in the final midterm sprint — here and here — Democrats have been forced to triage their map and pull support from tossup races to try and protect now-vulnerable Dems in typically safe blue districts as the GOP has expanded its map and built up expectations of a red wave.
And now, the Democrat Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) is shaking down Democrat lawmakers themselves to try and get some more money to try and save their party from an even more complete shellacking.
New reporting in Politico details how a "group of so-called 'frontliner' members, comprised of roughly two dozen at-risk Dem incumbents, has coordinated via a giant group text as they pass along an Excel doc with each members’ current dues status" with the DCCC working desperately to stem losses for President Biden's party.
"In the words of one frontliner who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak candidly: 'Everyone’s on the warpath now to get people to pay their damn dues,'" Politico added of the last-minute shakedown that's, at least in some cases, working:
Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.) — who is running to co-lead the Democrats’ messaging arm next cycle but doesn’t typically give to DCCC — recently made a $200K contribution to pay his dues in full. This came directly after some frontliners, including Rep. Cindy Axne (D-Iowa), informed Phillips they couldn’t support his leadership bid if he hadn’t paid up, according to people familiar with the conversations.
But many Democrats are apparently not putting their money where their proverbial mouth is when it comes to hyping up the need for Democrat loyalists to crack open their wallets and cough up campaign contributions. According to an "internal dues-tracking spreadsheet" Politico got its hands on, "sixty-eight House Democrats had paid less than 50 percent of their DCCC dues through mid-October."
Politico notes that some of the "delinquent" Democrats are those retiring at the end of the current Congress, and apparently don't care to help their party that failed to lead in a way that kept their seats safe enough to mount a reelection bid. Meanwhile, Politico adds that all member of the Squad — including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortex, Rashida Tlaib — had contributed nothing toward their dues for the 2022 midterm cycle.
Will the DCCC shakedown of House Democrats be enough to stem their party's losses? Unlikely. As Josh Kraushaar noted in a recent Axios analysis of the Dems' midterm map, "Democrats' House Majority PAC moved funds from an Oregon district Biden carried by nine points to salvage a suburban Portland district Biden won by 13 points."
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