early and often

Democrats Have Money, Too!

Politico tosses cold water on the claim that Democrats are getting severely burned in the fund-raising battle. Once you include the amount of money raised by the parties, it looks like they have an advantage:


The money race totals come to $856 million for the Democratic committees and their aligned outside groups, compared to $677 for their Republican adversaries, based on figures compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics.

These numbers come with a few big caveats: Republicans have so far doubled the Democrats in spending by outside groups, which generally don’t report their donors. This flexibility has allowed them to go after relatively safe Democratic seats, sometimes spending seven times more than the Republican challengers. The numbers don’t include the $243 million that three really rich Republican candidates gave to themselves (much less the $5.5 million California Senate candidate Carly Fiorina gave to her campaign), nor do they include money raised by individual candidates like Sharron Angle or Rand Paul.

And the final caveat is, of course, that there is still a week to go.

Update: The Times looked at individual House races, and its conclusions dovetail with the Politico article: “Democratic candidates have outraised their opponents over all by more than 30 percent in the 109 House races The New York Times has identified as in play. And Democratic candidates have significantly outspent their Republican counterparts over the last few months in those contests, $119 million to $79 million.”

Dems getting outspent? Not so fast [Politico]

Democrats Have Money, Too!