It’s all about the Benjamins baby

I’ve written a couple of times about how shocked I was by the almost total radio silence of the GOP here in Nevada, both in the primaries, and now into the general election. I’ve been covering this shit a long time, and there was just something wrong about it.

The big 2 Democrats, US House member Susie Lee, Senator Catherine Cortez-Masto, and Governor Steve Sisolak rocked. Lee was on every hour, touting her pro choice position, and hammering her presumed opponent on her stance. Cortez-Masto split between puff pieces touting her record, and hammering opponent Adam Laxalt for his subservience to big oil and big pharma. Sisolak ignored Joe Lombardo completely, posting uplifting ads about his accomplishments, including giving Nevada the best economy in the country coming out of Covid.

The GOP candidates out here are so MIA that Lee has stopped advertising, saving her money for October, and Cortez-Masto and Sisolak have cut down on the frequency of their positive ads. And still nothing from a major GOP candidate.

And now we know. We know because of 2 new pieces of reporting that show just how severe the GOP cash crunch is. The New York Times reported that by their analysis, between Memorial Day and Labor Day, which encompasses the primaries, the Democrats are projected to spend $74.2 million in advertising, as opposed to a measly $12.6 million by the GOP. The importance of this kind if a disparity is that it allows the Democrats to successfully frame their opponents, with almost no response from them.

It gets worse. Independent reporting shows that the NRSC has backed out of scheduled ad buys totaling some $10 million from Alaska and Arizona, and instead shifting it to Pennsylvania and Florida?! How much trouble is Rubio in down there? And one more. It has been reported that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is opening the spigot on some $120 million to prop up vulnerable GOP candidates, including places like Arizona, Colorado, North Carolina, and Ohio, where apparently The Billionaire Hillbilly can’t be bothered to pick up a pen, and write himself a check.

Here’s the 2nd one. Politico released a recently obtained audio tape of RNC Chair Ronna Romney (You can’t run from your own name, kid) McDaniel spending almost 35 minutes wheedling, begging, cajoling and chastising deep pocket donors to open the cash box and support Trump’s moronic candidates for the Senate. Doormat McDaniel claims that their message is solid, they just need the cash to get it out there. So far, it doesn’t seem to have had much of an effect. GOP big money donors know a dog candidate when they see one.

Here are two reasons why this is so important. First, You never get a second chance to make a first impression. 

By having blanket control of the airwaves, the Democrats have been able to brand themselves positively, while branding their opponents negatively, all without suffering return fire. And they’ve been able to do it for months! Don’t think that those impressions aren’t getting baked in voters heads right now.

Here’s the second part, and it actually comes in two pieces. The first part is this. In a traditional campaign, you raise as much money as you can, spend what you need to spend in the summer, and keep your powder dry for October and November. But the GOP Senate candidates are getting clobbered so badly in the media that McConnell has no choice. He has to spend like a drunken sailor now, in a desperate attempt to rehabilitate his candidates before it’s too late. And every penny he spends now is one he won’t have for September of October.

The second part is even more ominous for the GOP. There’s a technical term for when you pull advertising money from one or more states, and assign it to other states instead. It’s called triaging. Just like in a mass disaster, you have to pick the patients you think have the best chance of survival, and prioritize them at the expense of the more mortally wounded. As a former paramedic, I can tell you is isn’t easy.

But here’s the McGuffin. In a normal campaign, the triage process doesn’t even start to take place until at least mid September, and running through late October. The object is to give everybody their best shot for as long as possible before starting to cut your losses.

But Sweet Jesus! We’re not even to freakin’ Labor Day yet, and already the NRSC is shuffling their money around to try to plug holes in the dike. Which in itself tells you something important. Despite all of Romney-McDaniel’s desperate psiing and moaning, the NRSC is not looking for the situation to improve anytime soon. If the NRSC honestly thought that the big money donors would come through, they’d leave the current money where it is, and wait for the cavalry to arrive.

It turns out I was right a couple of months ago when I wrote about this as being a possible canary in the coal mine. But in all honesty, I didn’t think it went this far. I thought it was just really shitty GOP candidates in NV who couldn’t scrape together coin. But this reporting shows that it’s a national problem for the GOP, and it likely isn’t improving anytime soon. Deep pocket donors won’t contribute to shitty Trump Senate candidates, and the grassroots money is going straight to Trump. This just keeps getting better and better.

 

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12 COMMENTS

  1. It’s all down to Don the Con siphoning off donations to his own fund and not letting the GQOP have any of it. AFAIK, until he actually declares he’s standing for election, the FEC don’t step in and ask him to account for it

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    • That means he won’t declare until there’s some LEGAL advantage to him doing so. Financially speaking, a grifting Trump will grift as much as a grifting Trump can grift. (How much wood would a woodchuck chuck..?)

  2. There are dark money groups (Club for Growth, AIPAC) that will probably come in and try and shore up some of these candidates. But, as far as I know, the big donors – Koch, et al – are pretty much sitting this cycle out. We need every advantage we can get, with all the voter suppression these rethugs have legislated and all the gerrymandered house districts.

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    1
    • I don’t think so…Their object is to WIN…If the candidates are dogs, they aren’t going to throw good money after bad…

    • AIPAC is not dark money. It’s as blindingly obvious money as possible. If there’s a tight race between an Israel supporter and a racist fuck who justifies hating Jews/ Israel supporters, etc, AIPAC will be there. Where’s the surprise?? Although why they didn’t spend to get rid of Ihan is beyond my comprehension.

  3. I’m all for using the cash advantage and GOP funding woes to spend big framing the issues in our favor. But I DO also want them to not go hog wild. The GOP has spent decades honing its ability to suppress Democratic votes and this cycle and in a lot of these states the legislatures have injected themselves into the actual counting of votes. Toss in MAGA types being openly encouraged to threaten others, and even engage in violence and GOTV will be critical, as will having OUR observers and attorneys present at every single location where votes are counted, and as many precincts as possible. Complete with a hotline in each county and at the state level to call attention to (including via both local and national media) of outlaw behavior. That kind of organization is going to take serious money. As will educating voters all over the place in recognizing GOP scams. So again I hope our candidates have been making the kinds of preparations I’ve outlined, but also making damned sure they have the funds on hand to implement it once voting starts.

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  4. If the Senate folks are that far ahead in cash I would love to see some spread it out to gotv and support for down ballot candidates.

  5. Well, Florida (that is to say, Rubio) could be suffering because De Santis won’t quit poking *HIS* government’s face in Big Business’s business. For most of this year, any time a corporation has decided to support any semblance of progressive social policies (almost exclusively to help bolster their own bottom lines since it’s never good for business to antagonize a portion of its customer base), De Santis has gone out of his way to force *HIS* personal views on the business. Like when De Santis tried to punish cruise lines that wanted to enforce vaccination policies on customers using their ships. Or the way he got Disney’s special status pretty much revoked because the company criticized his anti-LGBTQ poilicies (and he “swears” that Florida taxpayers won’t be paying off Disney’s obligations but he hasn’t really explained HOW those obligations will be paid since Disney can prove that any “default” on its debt was NOT because Disney couldn’t/wouldn’t pay but rather “governmental intrusion”).

    I’m surprised that Democrats haven’t used De Santis’s own words and actions against him when they show how Christian conservative businesses have used their “deeply-held religious beliefs” to prevail in various lawsuits aimed at preventing discrimination against ANY minority group (but almost exclusively LGBTQ+ individuals). But here’s De Santis trying to force businesses to abide by HIS regressive policies, even if they go against corporate policies that prefer to move into the 21st century.

    • Big biz and death sentence are playing chicken. They’re seeing who is going to blink first. Big biz is thinking people are going to look at the jobs FL will lose if these large corporations move from FL and death sentence either doesn’t give a shit or thinks Floridians will get behind his asinine stances in spite of their economy going into the crapper. As for the Disney obligations, that will never be explained to the taxpayers-they will just be paying for something more and unless some astute journalist digs deep enough to find out why, it will be swept under the rug. We saw how death sentence plays fast and loose with the numbers put out by his admin. Don’t think he won’t try to do the same with this.

  6. Isn’t there going to be $1.6 B pumped into ads for ‘pubes? That’s going to make a difference and if it is held back until October, I suspect it will be a big difference. I wouldn’t be crowing from the rooftops until we see what that is going to do to the election scene because to think it will have no effect is unrealistic. My hope is that all this money the dems are spending now plus all they’ll be spending in October will make more of a difference. Still, $1.6 B is nothing to sneeze at.

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