Money tends to be a statement of priorities. And while the Democrats might look divided, the fundraising cycle is just horrible for the GOP. It's not just John McCain's poor numbers. The National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) is in even worse shape than previously understood.
As the National Republican Congressional Committee last week released the first details of the accounting scandal involving former Treasurer Christopher Ward, the committee's top official also asserted for the first time that the debt left over from the 2006 elections was actually in the range of $19 million.
NRCC Chairman Tom Cole (Okla.) had previously said that the committee's debt from last cycle was about $16 million, even though the highest amount reported to the Federal Election Commission was $14.5 million.
That's outright fraud, which cuts at the trust large donors have in the committee. And frankly, this could be more widespread in the GOP than it appears, as Ward was the treasurer for multiple committees.
Meanwhile, on the Democratic side, large resource sets are being deployed, anywhere from $150M to $400M to win the Presidency and pick up a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.
The commitments from participating organizations, who have banded together to "Take Back America" --
AFL-CIO - $50M program, targeting labor households, of course
Women's Voices Women's Vote Action Fund - $30M, targeting single women
National Council of La Raza - Democracia USA -- $4M - $6M
ACORN - $35M, targeting households in communities of color
Rock the Vote - $10M
Move On - $30M
The groups' effort will be supplemented by related PAC activity -- to the tune of $200M
And Change To Win - $100M
Todd Beeton explores this with this excellent post. I expect that McCain's favorables among union members - which right now are quite high - will decline as members hear from their union that McCain voted against overtime pay, against the minimum wage, and for the far right-wing economic agenda. The AFL-CIO and Change to Win budgets will see to that.
Rock the Vote and Women's Voices Women's Vote are both substantially ramped up. WVWV is a remarkable organization with a proven model tackling an immense civic challenge: the large number of unregistered single women. I would expect districts that have lots of them to shift their voter universe and makeup quite substantially, so any budding demographers that want to figure out where the single unregistered women are located will have a leg up in understand which districts and states will be better pickup opportunities. I don't yet understand Rock the Vote's strategy, but the youth space is exploding with innovation.
Moveon's budget is not substantially larger than it was in 2006, but they have become more effective at using their members for phone banking and GOTV. It's a pretty impressive set of outside actors, frankly, and one that has gotten better and better at working together over the last six years.
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