Democrats Have a Money Problem in the Races That Matter the Most

Por Jonathan Martin — POLITICO – TOP Stories

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — Perhaps emboldened by the rush of sweet tea he was sipping at The Floridian, an Old Florida institution here, David Jolly told me he “can get outspent by $100 million and win this race.”

The Florida Democrat may well have to test that argument.

He is confronting the same daunting predicament as other gubernatorial candidates around the country: Democrats are poised to enjoy their best midterm election in two decades, but they may fall short in a series of governors’ races because of the party’s warped donor culture.

Major Democratic contributors and small-dollar givers are flooding Senate hopefuls with cash, but in some of the most politically crucial states they could lose winnable gubernatorial races because they’re being so dramatically outspent by Republican nominees and their allied groups.

In former and future presidential battlegrounds Florida, Texas, Ohio, Georgia, Wisconsin and Nevada, the gubernatorial advertising gap is yawning. For the remainder of the campaign, Republicans are on track to outspend Democrats on television about 6-to-1 in Florida, more than 3-to-1 in Texas, 2.5-to-1 in Georgia, more than 2-to-1 in Wisconsin, and only slightly more narrowly in Ohio and Nevada.

That’s if current trends hold, as Democrats are largely booking week to week. So the difference in what’s already booked is even starker. As Kinetiq Political Insights data tells me, a single Republican, the Georgia gubernatorial nominee, has nearly as much advertising on the books there as Democrats do at the moment in all six of these races combined.

The public and private polling in these contests shows they’re competitive, and GOP strategists tell me that, were it not for their financial advantage, they’d lose most of them.

The Democratic Governors Association, with finite resources and 36 statehouse races on the ballot this year, is not on the air in Florida or Texas a month before the election. They’re spending in Ohio, Georgia and Nevada, where Republicans control the governorship, but are hampered in part because of their obligation to defend their own incumbents and hold those states with outgoing Democratic governors.

Liberal donors swooning over Senate races is not a new phenomenon. But it has accelerated in the age of Trump, and with decidedly mixed results.

Checking the president by controlling Congress is easy to grasp, short enough to fit on a bumper sticker with the right brevity. Nothing animates Democrats like confronting Trump, and flipping the House and Senate does as much.

Also, the attendant Washington-heavy focus of the media, along with social media algorithms that push what draws clicks, means most political hobbyists can tell you the name of big-state Senate candidates but not the party’s gubernatorial nominees (looking at you, Texas).

The problem is compounded for Democrats in capitals where they’re out of power, and have been for decades, because the transactional money from interests with business before state government will be overwhelmingly directed to the incumbent party.

Now, to be fair to Democratic donors, it’s easier to grasp what’s at stake for them and the country when they consider who will have congressional majorities. Particularly for Trump’s final two years, it’s understandable that that would mean more to, say, a Seattle-based contributor than who’s in the governor’s mansion in Tallahassee.

But the left should know better by now. The aftermath of 2020 and the unsubtle steps the president is taking now to seize election machinery should have underscored the importance of state and local elections, particularly for those officers counting or certifying election results.

More consequential, however, are the long-term implications of gubernatorial races this year.

If Democrats can win contests in red-tinted states next month, particularly across the Sun Belt, they’ll have a stronger infrastructure to be competitive in the 2028 presidential race. They would, in other words, have more paths to 270 electoral votes without living and dying with the fate of the blue-wall states across the Great Lakes.

“We don’t have a Democratic president; we don’t have the person who says, ‘If we win Florida, Texas and Georgia, the road to the White House is restructured,’” Jolly lamented. “There’s nobody with that collective party interest to say, ‘We got to focus resources in these two or three states to restructure them in ’28.’ It’s just a lot of individual actors at the top.”

When I brought up DGA Chair and Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, whose presidential ambitions are no secret, Jolly said his victory would mean “not only does the road to the White House go through Florida, but the road to the Democratic nomination goes through Florida.”

And if his point wasn’t clear enough, he pointed out that Govs. JB Pritzker of Illinois, Gavin Newsom of California and Wes Moore of Maryland had all contributed or were planning to come to Florida.

Most of the party’s most prominent figures, though, are focused on federal elections. Former President Barack Obama, for example, has raised money for House Democrats and has a fundraiser scheduled for Senate Democrats but hasn’t yet committed to help Democratic governors.

As large as the next race for the White House looms, 2030 will have a more lasting impact.

The census that year will reshape both the presidential and congressional map, moving electoral votes and House seats south because of population shifts. This will only make the Sun Belt more pivotal.

And if Democrats aren’t competitive there, they’ll not only have a hard time claiming the presidency, they’ll risk being shut out of power in the House in an era when they’ve struggled to win Senate seats in vast swaths of the country (they haven’t had more than 51 senators in their caucus for over a decade).

No, governors can’t automatically deliver states for their presidential nominees. But the chief executives can forge coalitions to demonstrate what’s possible while also rebuilding the machinery in states such as Florida and Texas, where the party has atrophied. Neither state has elected a Democratic governor since the ’90s. And while Georgia has elected a pair of promising senators, they’ve not elected a Democratic governor this century. And if they don’t this year, neither Sens. Raphael Warnock nor Jon Ossoff may be on the 2028 national ticket given that a Republican would appoint their Senate successor.

Most tangibly, Democratic governors can play a role in redistricting, whether it’s after the next census or in the seemingly perpetual arms race that is reapportionment today.

“If we can run point on the next redistricting, we can claw back four or six congressional seats,” Jolly told me, alluding to outgoing Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ (R) middecade redraw to suggest he’d do the same even before the census. “I call it the DeSantis Precedent: Why can’t I draw new maps when I get there?”

Between just Florida, Texas and Georgia, there are currently 80 House seats. That number is expected to grow to 88 or 89 after the next census. Add in Arizona and Nevada, the two Western presidential battlegrounds of this era, and the future number could be as high as 114 — five Sun Belt states accounting for over a quarter of the entire House.

Arizona, where Gov. Katie Hobbs is seeking reelection, is likely to remain in Democratic hands — and will as long as Republicans keep nominating Kari Lakes rather than Doug Duceys. But Democrats may not have a better chance at flipping governorships in the rest of these states than this year.

To do so, they’ll have to overcome a mountain of money.

In Texas, that means state Rep. Gina Hinojosa overcoming a three-term incumbent, Gov. Greg Abbott, who entered the year with over $100 million on hand. In Georgia, former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms is confronting a wealthy executive, Rick Jackson, who has poured over $100 million of his own fortune into the race since the primary. And in Nevada, the gap isn’t quite as vast — but Gov. Joe Lombardo outraised Attorney General Aaron Ford about 5-to-1 in the first half of the year.

In the Midwest, Democrats are facing another self-funder in Ohio, Vivek Ramaswamy, who can continue to write checks against Democrat Amy Acton, after former Sen. Sherrod Brown passed on the race in favor of another Senate bid, in part because, between national donors and super PACs, it’s easier to finance. In Wisconsin, Republicans have been elevated by a sudden infusion of over $24 million from three donors. The flood of cash may not be enough to defeat Democrat David Crowley but could have downballot implications should Republican Rep. Tom Tiffany close the race to the infinitesimal margins that have marked Wisconsin elections in recent years.

“Even if he only loses narrowly, the flood of Republican money could keep the state Legislature in GOP hands, denying Democrats a once-in-a-generation shot at unified control of the Wisconsin state government and a chance to undo the GOP’s House gerrymander and address its intentionally restrictive voting laws before the next presidential race,” said former Wisconsin Democratic Chair Ben Wikler.

Back at The Floridian, Jolly conceded that part of his challenge is that Florida has, in the years after Obama carried it twice, taken on the reputation as fool’s gold for Democratic donors, much in the same way as Texas.

“We’ve had data for six months showing this race tied or us up, and people just struggle to accept the data because it’s Florida,” he said, as TV ads above the bar blared with political commercials. “It’s a lot of heartbreak for people.”

Jolly’s concern is that it’s getting late early — there’s no such thing as an Election Day in Florida. “I think 60% of the state has voted by Oct. 20,” he said.

But if Jolly, a former Republican House member who became a Democrat in the Trump era and whose accent evokes Matthew McConaughey, can narrow the spending gap this month, he may have a chance to spring an upset.

He’s running almost entirely on a mantra of being for housing, health care and education and against data centers.

Polls show him winning enough Republicans and unaffiliates to be close, vital in a state where Democratic registration has collapsed. And Jolly’s GOP opponent, Rep. Byron Donalds, recently took down his website’s Trump endorsement language, only to restore it after it was revealed, and Trump issued a barely veiled threat. (Stephen A. Smith, though, has surfaced on Donalds’ mailers.)

Donalds also faces the challenge of overcoming a history of Black Republicans being rejected in gubernatorial and Senate races: No African American conservative has won either, without first being appointed, since Massachusetts Sen. Ed Brooke was reelected in 1972.

Jolly is careful about Donalds’ race and even made a point, at a Black church in Palm Beach County, of acknowledging to the audience that he grasped his opponent’s history-making potential.

That was before the verse-quoting Democrat, the son of a Baptist pastor, laid out a detailed indictment about Donalds’ record on race-related issues and brought the audience to their feet by saying Florida schoolchildren must know about the state’s Rosewood massacre.

Jolly said he saw similarities between himself and James Talarico, the Senate candidate in Texas and another devout Christian Democrat.

To compete as a Democrat these days in Florida and Texas, it does take faith. But it also requires cash. And unless Jolly finds more of it, he may wind up coming up just short.

Isn’t the most likely scenario, I argued, that he benefits from an extraordinary Democratic year but ultimately loses by a percentage point and a half or so because the state has just become so Republican and the financial gap is so vast?

“It’s always a possibility,” he conceded.

But, sipping his tea, Jolly said Trump’s crushing win here in 2024 didn’t tell the whole story and that a series of special elections pointed to considerable Democratic enthusiasm and Republican apathy.

His conclusion: “Donalds has spent over $80 million, and this race is tied, or we’re ahead.”

Fonte: POLITICO – TOP Stories