What if the Schumer Shutdown turned out to be a desperate grift to play catch-up with the RNC? And what if it doesn't work?
For the second quarter in a row, the DNC has come up woefully short on cash reserves compared to the GOP. The new quarterly reports show that both parties managed to raise about the same amount in the July-September period, but that Democrats keep burning more of it while Republicans keep adding to their overall advantage. The RNC raised $10.7 million in Q3 and ended with $86 million cash-on-hand, while Democrats raised $10.3 million but only had $12 million in reserve.
If this situation sounds familiar, it should. It's basically an echo of Q2:
The Republican National Committee ended the first half of 2025 with a $65.56 million cash on hand advantage over the Democratic Party, as the left works to rebound from 2024 election losses and the right continues to deeply intertwine its future with President Trump.
New campaign finance filings show the RNC had more than $80.7 million at the end of June, while the Democratic National Committee finished with around $15.2 million in cash on hand as both parties prepare for next year's midterm elections.
Three months ago, DNC chair Ken Martin claimed they were on the cusp of singing Happy Days Are Here Again:
"The DNC is breaking grassroots fundraising records, bringing on more volunteers than ever, and raising record-setting funds to beat Republicans. Democrats are back in the ring thanks to grassroots energy across all 50 states, and together, we're going to defeat the toxic Republican agenda and put this country back on track for hard-working families," Martin said in a statement.
Gee, Ken, how did that work out? Three months later, the RNC has grown its nest egg by more than five million dollars. Democrats, on the other hand, have depleted their reserves by nearly three million dollars. They're going in the wrong direction -- still -- while claiming that support has never been stronger for opposition to Donald Trump's administration.
Perhaps the grassroots funding did improve, although the RNC still slightly outraised them in Q3. Even so, as the Wall Street Journal reports, their big-ticket donors and organizers have made themselves scarce as of late. Some offered direct criticism about the direction of the party, while others offered excuses for their absence:
At one point earlier this year, the DNC reached out to big donors to host a San Francisco-area fundraiser headlined by former Vice President Kamala Harris. Most of the donors rejected the request, according to several people familiar with the conversations.
Upon receiving the invitation, one replied with a profanity-laced rejection. Others said they didn’t want to give to the party until it produced substantive plans to win elections. Those who declined told the national party they had commitments and couldn’t make it work.
Let's just stipulate to the wisdom of those donors who offered direct objections to the lack of a serious plan to compete. After all, if the DNC expects donors to take heart in their leadership for 2026 while offering Kamala Harris as a headliner in 2025, that's hardly a confidence builder in the idea that Democrats learned a damned thing in 2024. Plus, it's not as if Harris proved herself a coherent speaker, let alone an entertaining raconteur, during her legendary 107-day exercise in electoral incompetence.
Who will the DNC offer next -- her running mate, Gov. JazzHands McSnitchLine?
Donors are not just objecting to the desperate grasp on Brat Summer. One surprising voice in the Dem donor community is attempting to organize a push to get Democrats to move away from the progressive radicals that have forced the party into the 20 side of the 80/20 issues in the American electorate:
Rachel Pritzker, a donor and fundraiser who chairs a group trying to push Democrats closer to the center, said many party donors are concerned that the progressivism pushed by such figures as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) and Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, the self-described democratic socialist favored in New York City’s Nov. 4 mayoral election, will hurt Democrats.
“They’re worried that the way the party looks and sounds can’t really compete and win elections,” said Pritzker, an heir to the Hyatt hotel fortune and a relative of the Democratic billionaire governor of Illinois, JB Pritzker. “They’re worried that it needs to reorient toward the cultural mainstream and it needs to basically rebrand.”
When the Pritzkers tell you that you need to stop sniffing the progressive-elite glue, that's really something.
And thus we come to the Schumer Shutdown. Having looked at these donor figures, Democrats had a choice, and decided to keep choosing the radical-progressive grift. Perhaps they hoped to get a boost from donors by doubling down on Trump Derangement Syndrome; perhaps it might even work, in the short run. But when tens of thousands of federal workers can't come back to work at the end of this and have to find jobs in the private sector, and when millions of Americans realize that shutdowns are still just inside-the-Beltway stunts that cost them money, how long will that potential bubble last? And when donors realize that the shutdown is performative cover for a still-bankrupt party that can't say no to hard-Left radicals, why would they bother to host fundraisers?
We'll get some of these answers in January. We'll get the rest of them in November 2026.
Editor’s Note: The Schumer Shutdown is here. Rather than put the American people first, Chuck Schumer and the radical Democrats forced a government shutdown for healthcare for illegals. They own this.
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