You know all about the GOP’s cash crunch if you’ve been reading regularly these past two weeks. The NRSC raised boatloads of money this cycle to support Republican Senate candidates in battlegrounds like Pennsylvania and Arizona, which is why it came as a shock to hear that the group had begun canceling some spending on ads this fall. Insiders were shocked too. “People are asking, ‘What the hell is going on?’” one Republican strategist told Politico. “Why are we cutting in August? I’ve never seen it like this before.” Apparently the NRSC spent most of its war chest earlier in the cycle expecting that small-dollar donations would roll in this summer as Republican voters got excited for the red wave this fall.

But that didn’t happen. Maybe it’s inflation, maybe it’s something else, but online fundraising has been disappointing. Meanwhile, GOP voters nominated a number of newbie candidates for Senate (Blake Masters, Mehmet Oz, Herschel Walker, J.D. Vance) who have no experience fundraising, leading to poorer-than-expected money hauls. On top of all that, Trump’s Super PAC keeps vacuuming up money from average joes who are still willing to donate — “give us your credit card number and avenge the search of Mar-a-Lago!” — while declining to spend its windfall to help Masters, Oz, and the rest. That leaves donors tapped out when other Republican groups come knocking.

Result: As of the end of June, the NRSC had $28.5 million in the bank while its counterpart, the DSCC, had … $53.5 million. My guess is that the gap has only widened since then as furious liberals rage-donate to Democratic groups to express their anger at the Dobbs decision.

The RNC is starting to get fidgety about it, particularly as the generic ballot polling and recent special elections suggest that this fall will be more competitive than anyone thought.

During a 36-minute conference call, a recording of which was obtained by POLITICO, McDaniel argued that the party has strong Senate candidates and a favorable political environment. But she went on to say that Republican candidates are being swamped by Democrats in the chase for campaign cash. The Supreme Court’s June decision nixing Roe v. Wade, McDaniel said, triggered a gusher of online donations for the opposition…

“We absolutely have better candidates and a better message,” McDaniel said, pushing back on what she described as a false, media-driven narrative that the GOP’s prospects in Senate races are waning. “But,” she said, “we do need financial firepower to drive our effort.”

“Newt and I were just talking, in this environment, our candidates can win if they’re outspent two-to-one, but if it gets four, five, six to one, it becomes more difficult, and we’re seeing that specifically on the Senate side. So my call to action today,” McDaniel added, “is to please help us invest in these Senate races specifically. Give to any of these Senate candidates, all of these Senate candidates if you can, so all of them can be on TV.”

The GOP does have a better message this year, it’s true. “Historic inflation!” is a gut punch to Democrats. But better candidates?

Some of those candidates are barely lucid:

Others don’t seem to know that they’re bad:

Fox's Maria Bartiromo asks Dr. Oz about whether Sen. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell was talking about him when he said Republicans have bad Senate candidates: "Was he talking about you?"

Oz: "He was not, and I'll tell ya he expressed himself quite clearly with his pocketbook." pic.twitter.com/Fl1fh524tz

— The Recount (@therecount) August 25, 2022

McConnell isn’t putting $34 million into your race because he thinks you’re a good candidate, doc. He’s putting $34 million in because you’ve turned a 50/50 state into one that now churns out polls like this:

Pennsylvania General Election Poll:#PASen:
Fetterman (D) 43% (+13)
Oz (R) 30%#PAGov:
Shapiro (D) 44% (+11)
Mastriano (R) 33%

Franklin & Marshall (8/15-8/22)

— Political Polls (@PpollingNumbers) August 25, 2022

It’s the bad candidates who need the most financial help, not the good ones. (Right, J.D.?) But as I said a few days ago, I think Uncle Mitch is happy to contribute. If he spends $35 million on Vance or Masters or some other MAGA firebrand, it’s all upside for him. If the candidates lose, McConnell has the gratitude of his party for having done his best to help and gets to sail into next year without the headache of having more populists in his caucus. If the candidates win, they owe their seats — and therefore their allegiance — to McConnell. With Trump and his PAC sitting on the sidelines and small donors not filling the gap, it’s a buyer’s market for Mitch. So he and his PAC are buying Oz and Vance and probably Masters too.

Oz is uniquely poorly positioned within the GOP’s Senate crop this year since he’s the only one with no natural constituency in either wing of the party. Jim Geraghty hits on a point today that I made recently, that the normal enthusiasm a Republican nominee might expect from the populist right is lacking in his case. Walker, Vance, and Masters can count on having 45 percent or so of the electorate in their pockets to start, leaving them to focus on clawing five or six points away from Democrats in the center. But Oz is forced to claw in both directions, trying to bring in centrists who are wary of his “TV quack” image and MAGAs who are wary of his very un-populist squishiness. Per Geraghty, one recent poll had his approval rating in Pennsylvania at 53/38 — among Republicans.

There may be another factor working against Oz and other Republican candidates this year, though. It’s received wisdom by now that Democrats are being helped by a backlash to the end of Roe on the left. But Josh Barro reminds us that there may be a much smaller yet still significant backlash to the end of Roe on the right as well. The coalition Trump built includes a lot of non-religious populists who don’t necessarily hew closely to conservative dogma about abortion. Seeing Roe go up in smoke may be giving them pause:

Of course, the Republican base is pleased about Dobbs. But the base always turns out to vote for you — that’s what makes them the base. One of the reasons Donald Trump was able to win in 2016 despite alienating large numbers of traditionally Republican voters in upscale suburbs was that he brought out so many new voters who weren’t traditionally part of the Republican base — often, non-college-educated white voters in the north who had previously voted for Obama, or less-engaged voters who previously hadn’t voted at all.

Both of those groups of voters tend not to be motivated by the core issues that traditionally interest the religious right, such as abortion. They tend to be relatively disconnected from civic institutions, including churches. Bill Clinton did well with these voters at a time when Republicans were seen as moralizing scolds who wanted to take away your Medicare. Trump won them over by emphasizing opposition to immigration, abandoning unpopular Republican economic planks on Social Security and Medicare, and defending their “traditional” values against a snobby elite without projecting a religiously conservative moral worldview.

If there was any doubt that Democrats will flood the airwaves this fall with abortion ads, Pat Ryan’s shocking upset in the New York special election on Tuesday removed it. That’s what McDaniel’s worried about it, I assume — that an election which the GOP was and still is hoping to turn into a referendum on inflation will instead end up as a referendum on Roe due to the overpowering amount of lefty money behind that message. Time for the GOP donor class to pony up.