That’s the good news. The great news? They’ve got a little more than $2 million in debt on the books, too. And their fundraising take last month was less than half of the DNC’s.

Given the number of other Republican groups raising money, this isn’t as disastrous as going into battle without ammunition. It’s more like going into battle without ammunition for just one of your armies.

So, not disastrous — but bad. With potential implications for the whole war.

In a report filed with the Federal Election Commission this evening, the RNC showed $5.5 million raised and more than $11 million spent — including $1.5 million in transfers to state party committees — last month.
The committee ended July with $5.3 million in the bank and $2.2 million in debt.

The Democratic National Committee raised and spent $11.6 million in July, including nearly $4 million in transfers to state parties. The DNC ended the period with $10.8 million. The DNC had $3.5 million in debt.

The dismal report comes less than a month after RNC Treasurer Randy Pullen accused Chairman Michael Steele of hiding $7 million in debts; the RNC filed amended reports in July detailing $3 million in previously unreported debts.

More from Politico, which has been splashing around in the endless flood of stories about RNC financial problems for months:

The RNC’s money woes have many party leaders and operatives deeply worried about whether the GOP will be able to take full advantage of an otherwise promising election cycle. Of most concern are get-out- the-vote activities that are typically funded by the national committee. While the RNC OK’d a $10 million line-of-credit at its meeting earlier this month, that will still be insufficient to fund the sort of voter contact efforts needed across the House, Senate, gubernatorial and local races this year. Senior Republicans are expecting newly created third-party groups such as American Crossroads to step in and assist with the ground game.

American Crossroads, the new group (actually two groups) from Karl Rove and Ed Gillespie, has raised $17.6 million since March. As for the RNC, we’re in campaign mode now so let’s look on the bright side. First, as Patrick Ruffini pointed out on Twitter, the RNC had $44 million in the bank in June 2006 compared to just $10 million for the DNC and the Dems still managed to deliver a thumpin’ in November. (A caveat: Former DNC staffer Kombiz Lavasany claims that that’s only because the DNC had already spread its money around to state parties by that point in the cycle.) Second, the DNC may be doing well but independent Democratic groups — which the left has relied on to fuel attack ads against Republicans over the last few cycles — are in trouble because rich liberals aren’t ponying up. Yet another data point proving that ObamaCare’s passage wasn’t the catalyzing factor for the midterms that the left hoped it’d be:

Democrats attribute the stinginess to a variety of factors, including the lingering recession, the absence of a single unifying enemy such as former President George W. Bush and fatigue among the wealthy donors who wrote big checks during the past two election cycles.

There’s also a degree of disenchantment with the Obama political operation, which discouraged big-dollar independent activity when then-Sen. Barack Obama’s campaign was shattering fundraising records during the 2008 presidential campaign and has done little to revive it since. In addition, tension between the White House and organized labor, a traditional Democratic ally and source of political cash, has suppressed the totals…

In fact, of the 10 Democratic-leaning 527 groups that have been most active over the past three election cycles, seven have raised less in the 2010 cycle (some by a wide margin) than their average fundraising tallies at this point in the previous three cycles, a POLITICO analysis found.

Third, the GOP’s House fundraising committee raked in $8.5 million in July, which was $2 million more its Democratic counterpart and $5 million more than its own numbers in June. They still trail the Dems by $14 million in terms of overall money, but Democratic fundraising — at both the House and Senate level — actually declined substantially from June to July. An early indication of November apathy among the lefty base? If the numbers stay flat, they’ll have to start thinking about Dick Morris’s doomsday dilemma: Do they spread their money around among all vulnerable Dems or do they write off, say, the 30 most vulnerable seats and pour their money into the 30-40 less vulnerable ones in order to increase their chances of holding the House? They’re going to take heavy losses no matter what. The only question is how best to keep some control of the battlefield.

So there you go. That wasn’t bad for a notorious eeyore, no?