Bloomberg reports that the Democratic National Committee's financial woes continue as Chairman Tom Perez and his colleagues continue to spend more than they take in. In fact, the DNC has already added $3 million in new debt in just the past four months. The Republican National Committee, however, is raking in boatloads of cash ahead of the 2020 election which will surely give President Donald J. Trump a leg up on whomever he ends up running against.
In 2019 already, the "DNC had collected contributions of more than $24.4 million but had spent $28.4 million, according to the latest disclosures. It had $7.6 million cash on hand, $1 million less than in January. It posted $6.2 million in debt, including bank loans and unpaid invoices to vendors," according to Bloomberg.
But, the RNC has $34.7 million on hand with no debt at all. Plus, the GOP has raised $63 million this year.
Some Democratic party bundlers insist that the only reason donations are so low is because people are giving their dollars to individual candidates seeking the nomination, not the actual party right now.
"We will have the largest and most enthusiastic fundraising machine that the Democrats have ever seen," the new head of the party's fundraising operation, Chris Korge, promised.
Others argue that the debt and lack of funding are due in large part thanks to the corrupt former Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
"Debbie Wasserman Schultz really destroyed a lot of confidence in the DNC for a lot of people and for a lot of different reasons,” John Morgan, an Orlando-based fundraise told Bloomberg.
The website gives readers a reminder of what exactly occurred under her watch:
The DNC isn’t sharing in the money bonanza in part because of the perception that it hasn’t recovered from 2016’s self-inflicted blows, fundraisers said. Emails hacked by the Russians and published by WikiLeaks showed that it was working to help Hillary Clinton defeat Bernie Sanders for the nomination even though it was publicly pledging neutrality. That led to the resignation of DNC chairwoman, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, on the eve of the Democratic Convention in Philadelphia.
But just because the RNC has such an advantage over the DNC does not mean that GOP party leaders are going to stop fundraising anytime soon. Last weekend President Donald J. Trump's campaign courted donors via a three-day campaign retreat in Chicago. Axios observes that this is President Trump's "latest effort to court deep-pocketed Republicans who failed to come out for Donald Trump in 2016, and it further signals that the president's days of snubbing traditional fundraising mechanisms are over."
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