‘The party is a hot mess.’
T he Democratic National Committee is in dire straits financially.
Nine months after Kamala Harris’s disastrous presidential election performance, her party shows no signs of rebuilding itself on the money front. According to campaign finance reports filed this week, the DNC had less than $14 million on hand as of July 31 compared with the Republican National Committee’s $84 million.
As Politico observed, this summer’s fundraising nadir marks the lowest amount of cash the DNC has had in the bank at any point in the past five years. And the situation has gotten so dire that, according to the New York Times, DNC officials have discussed borrowing money to keep the lights on.
The donor fatigue is understandable after deep-pocketed Democrats watched their most recent presidential nominee burn through an average of $100 million per week in the final stretch of the campaign with nothing to show for it, save for a few glitzy celebrity concerts and fancy campaign rallies. In the end, the Joe Biden and Kamala Harris campaigns raised more than $2 billion — only for Donald Trump to sweep all seven battleground states and help Republicans win the popular vote for the first time in two decades.
Looking ahead, donors want assurances that their money won’t be mismanaged in 2026 and that the party has a concrete plan to turn things around.
“Donors want what voters for the Democratic Party everywhere want,” said Pat Dennis, president of American Bridge, a Democratic opposition research super PAC. “They want the same thing, which is a plan to win.”
The national party’s effort to settle on an electoral game plan for the 2026 midterms has not been easy. As many operatives see it, the electoral solution is simple: keep the focus on high prices and remind voters that President Trump’s tariffs are ushering in a wave of economic uncertainty.
That guidance is falling on deaf ears among many elected Democrats. Congressional Democrats have spent the past few months ping-ponging between different issues of the moment, from Elon Musk’s cost-cutting efforts at the start of Trump’s second term to Medicaid reforms in the reconciliation bill to deportations to the administration’s takeover of Washington, D.C.
On top of Democrats’ perennial, internal struggle between the progressive and the more moderate factions, the party is at war over generational and strategic change. Operatives and candidates do not have a clear strategy on how — or even whether — they should moderate on divisive issues like immigration policy and gender-transition medical interventions for children.
Privately, many Democratic strategists sneer that the DNC is irrelevant and that infighting among its senior leadership earlier this year has hurt the party. But even those who would rather ignore intra-DNC squabbling concede that fundraising is often a helpful barometer of the party’s health.
The national party’s fundraising is being outshined by that of elected Democrats like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the progressive darling who raised $15 million in the first six months of the year alone. As of June 30, she had nearly $10 million in the bank — a jaw-dropping amount of cash for a single lawmaker that suggests many small-dollar Democratic donors are craving a party that moves further left in 2026 and beyond.
Making matters worse, there’s a perception among many middle-of-the-road voters that Democrats care more about performative antics than a concrete policy vision for the middle class. Take, for example, Representative Al Green’s interruptions during Trump’s joint address before Congress in March, House Democrats’ trip to El Salvador to visit deported illegal alien Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, Texas Democrats’ trip to Illinois to delay a vote on a GOP-drawn map, or New Jersey Senator Cory Booker’s 25-hour filibuster earlier this year.
“Voters are just kind of fed up with what we have to offer at times,” said Lauren Harper Pope, co-founder of Welcome PAC, a spending group that supports centrist Democrats. “The brand perception is bad, and there’s a pretty big void in terms of direction and a coherent, compelling vision for the future.”
Democratic operatives say that it’s not unusual for an out-of-power party to experience fundraising troubles during an off year, especially after such a brutal electoral defeat. After all, it wasn’t too long ago when the RNC ended November 2023 with just $10 million on hand compared with the DNC’s then $20 million in the bank. One year later, Trump mounted one of the most stunning electoral comebacks in modern history.
But fundraising is one of many metrics that political operatives use to measure their party’s health. And right now, nothing is looking good for the out-of-power party.
On the polling front, Democrats are experiencing record-low approval ratings. And voter registration data compiled by the New York Times show that voters are fleeing the Democratic Party in droves. Democrats lost 2.1 million voters between 2020 to 2024 in Washington, D.C., and the 30 states that allow voters to register by party. Republicans made gains in every single one of those states, including battlegrounds like North Carolina, Arizona, and Pennsylvania.
In other words, Pope said, “the party is a hot mess.”