What a cast of characters! . . Loyalists to Trump haven’t been chastened by the failed bid to overturn the 2020 presidential election, warned Bennett, who delivered the message in a conference room at FGS Global, among the capital’s leading crisis management firms. Rather, they have learned valuable lessons about the importance of installing allies in positions of authority — such as overseeing elections administration or writing the rules governing voting — in battleground states.
The fact that the elites are not alarmed enough and the money isn’t flowing in that direction at sufficient speed is really alarming,” said Matt Bennett, a veteran of Democratic issue campaigns and co-founder of the centrist policy group Third Way.
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Arizona, a pivotal swing state and presidential battleground, is a case in point. Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly is flush with cash in his reelection bid — he’s raised more than $52 million to date, including $13.6 million in the most recent fundraising quarter.But Democratic donors have been slow to dig into their pockets for Arizona’s secretary of state race, where the GOP nominee is Mark Finchem, a state legislator who has claimed repeatedly and without evidence that the 2020 election was tainted by fraud, and who says he would not have certified the election for Biden. Through mid-August, Finchem pulled in $1.2 million, compared to roughly $700,000 for Democrat Adrian Fontes, according to a report compiled for POLITICO by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.
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‘The threat is real’: Dems press big donors to target state races
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"Kristina Karamo, Mark Finchem and Jim Marchant, the Republican secretary of state candidates in Michigan, Arizona and Nevada, respectively, attend a conference on conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election in West Palm Beach, Fla., Sept. 10, 2022. | Jim Rassol/AP Photo
Increasingly worried that big donors are failing to recognize the scale of the threat to democratic norms, Democratic strategists and party officials are rallying behind an effort to persuade them to redirect their cash to key state and local elections.
Wealthy party donors, these Democrats say, remain too focused on giving to higher profile congressional races. And it’s coming at the expense of under-the-radar contests that could put scores of Republicans who deny the legitimacy of President Joe Biden’s 2020 victory in charge of running elections and writing the rules governing them.
While Democratic candidates in top U.S. House and Senate races are flush with cash in the run-up to November, a number of those running for key state legislative and statewide posts aren’t nearly as well-heeled. At the statehouse level, the Republican State Leadership Committee, which mainly works to elect GOP state lawmakers, has spent nearly twice as much in the current election cycle as its Democratic counterpart, the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, according to the Center for Political Accountability.
That’s a problem in a midterm where GOP candidates who falsely claim Donald Trump won the 2020 election are on the November ballot in more than half the races for governor and at least one-third of attorney general and secretary of state races, according to States United Democracy Center, a nonpartisan pro-democracy organization. At least 600 GOP state legislators who held office in 2021 lied about the 2020 election, or supported legal efforts challenging its integrity, according to the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee. . .
Republicans are reaping the rewards of their investment while
expanding the battlefield to include state executives, law enforcement
officials and state supreme courts. . .
A new generation of Trump-inspired lawmakers has Democratic officials warning that state legislatures could overturn the will of voters in future elections. Already, legislatures in 33 states are considering at least 244 bills that seek to undermine nonpartisan election administration, an acceleration from last year, according to a report released last month by States United Democracy Center and Law Forward, nonpartisan groups seeking to advance democracy.
What’s needed, Bennett told the group, is the same effort and coordination that goes into a presidential campaign — namely a $1 billion investment to repel a “systematic, sophisticated and serious” assault on the next presidential election that could be more successful than the 2020 slapdash approach of legal challenges and pressure on local election officials that ended in a bloody assault on the U.S. Capitol.
Priorities for big donors should include matching or exceeding “the MAGA movement in its effort to recruit poll workers,” providing them with physical protection and legal representation if they are threatened with criminal or civil sanction, funding organizations that advocate for “clean” elections and recruiting lawyers “ready to sue to stop the unconstitutional abrogation of voting rights and attempts by partisans to grab power from nonpartisan elections officials,” according to Third Way’s presentation.
“They need more money, talent, people, social media presence and attention. A LOT MORE,” the presentation says.
Several attendees described the meeting as a sobering call to action for party “influencers” to convince more donors, party elite and corporate America that they need to take a “presidential campaign approach” to protecting democracy, including elevating local officials through support for nonpartisan elections administration and a shift to prioritizing more donations to campaigns of state and local officials in several swing states. . .
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In the Pennsylvania governor’s race, Democrat Josh Shapiro’s fundraising is also far outpacing Republican Doug Mastriano, who has said he would require voters to “re-register” and has been subpoenaed by the House committee investigating the attack on the Capitol.
“A tradition unlike any other: state Democrats realizing at the end of the cycle that their socialist agenda is toxic with voters and sending out a smoke signal to their liberal billionaire donors to bail them out of political peril,” said RSLC spokesperson Andrew Romeo, in a statement responding to the premise that Democrats are financial underdogs in state and local races.
While isolated initiatives designed to counter what some Democrats consider to be the newest threats to democracy — such as the targeting of elections administration — are taking shape on the left, these efforts aren’t necessarily fully funded.
To many Democratic activists and strategists, those efforts pale next to what they’re up against. They cite a $1.6 billion gift to Federalist Society co-chair Leonard Leo, the largest known political advocacy donation in history, much of which they expect to flow to state-level coffers, including for attorney general, secretary of state and state supreme courts.
“A significant investment from big donors would make a big difference,” said Geoff Burgan, spokesperson for DAGA.
“We need more resources. Period,” he said.
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