Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff keep insisting that their impeachment argument has gained credibility and will produce a consensus to act against Donald Trump. Polling keeps sliding slowly in the other direction, although that wiggles around a bit, with public opinion in the surveys tied tightly to partisan affiliation and opinions of Trump. What if people put their money where their mouths are on impeachment?
What … if they already have?
Consider the RNC’s October fundraising haul, gathered as Schiff & Co flogged Ukraine-Gate hard in the media and leaked testimony that was supposed to be akin to grand-jury proceedings. The overwhelming media narrative was sharply negative about Trump and his GOP defenders. And yet, two days ago, the RNC announced a record haul for an off-year October:
The Republican National Committee fundraising juggernaut, fueled by a GOP backlash to the House impeachment effort to force President Trump from office, scored another record in October and pushed the bank account past $61 million.
The debt-free RNC told Secrets exclusively that it brought in $25.3 million in October and has $61.4 million cash on hand.
For perspective, that is nearly triple what it raised in October 2017, the last nonelection October, and the money on hand is the most since 2012.
But what about the Democrats and their crusade to cleanse the White House? Surely that rallied donors large and small, especially once Schiff began the formal process of putting together depositions. The House’s vote to authorize the parameters of the inquiry didn’t take place until the last day of the month, but it had a few weeks of momentum behind it. Surely this must have had a salutary impact on support for the DNC, if Schiff and his team were making the sale on impeachment.
Er … nope. The news was bad enough that the DNC dropped their numbers in the middle of last night’s debate, when few were paying attention to much else:
DNC drops its October FEC report in middle of the debate: $8.7m on hand, $7m in debt. https://t.co/VUUBeNl9cP
— Reid Wilson (@PoliticsReid) November 21, 2019
The DNC raised well under half of the RNC in October, but the numbers are worse than that. They spent $8.9 million to raise $9.02 million, with a net gain for the month of … $102,544. And perhaps some loose change. The RNC also spent heavily in this cycle — more on that in a moment — but they also managed to add two million dollars to their cash on hand. And while the RNC continues to carry no debt at all, the DNC’s debt level is only $1.7 million below their cash on hand, which is almost 1/8th of the RNC’s war chest at the moment.
What exactly did the RNC get with its expenditures? The RNC’s official statement this morning cited “newspaper ad buys in 15 2020 states and multi-million dollar Stop The Madness ad buys,” some of those in Spanish. It’s also funding protests against the impeachment, which seems an indirect and yet still significant indicator that Democrats have failed to expand the argument beyond their own partisans.
They even had enough to use Donald Trump Jr’s book for a donor promotion:
New FEC disclosures show a single large RNC payment of $94,800 to Books-a-Million in October, a few days before "Triggered" was released. An RNC spokesman confirmed that the expenditure was connected to their promotion of Don Trump Jr.'s book. pic.twitter.com/vsmmsgrYCp
— Nick Confessore (@nickconfessore) November 21, 2019
Yes, it’s going to be amusing to some people that the RNC bought Trump Jr’s books, but consider this too: The $95K figure is barely a drop in the bucket for the RNC’s October “profit” figure. It would be almost all of what the DNC added to its cash on hand for the same month.
All of this would be of little import if polls showed a groundswell of bipartisan grassroots support for removing Trump from office. As of today, though, the FiveThirtyEight aggregate tracker puts the question at nearly a dead tie, with less than one percent gap:
This impeachment project is failing on both fronts. How long will Democrats keep it up?
