Last Call For Batboy: The Dark Money Rises (And Falls)

Normally late August in a midterm election year is where the minority party revs up to take multiple Senate seats from a party where the opposing party's President is unpopular, salivating over big gains in the upper chamber.

This year, however, the Senate GOP's campaign arm, the NRSC, is in a complete tailspin, having already burned through most of its cash and now behind in several races they thought were shoo-ins just two-months ago. 

The recriminations and finger-pointing are already underway, and the biggest target is Florida GOP Sen. Rick Scott, the NRSC's current chair and moderately eldritch comic book villain whose biggest contribution to America so far has been his record of being the largest Medicare fraudster in US history at the time in 1999.

Republican Senate hopefuls are getting crushed on airwaves across the country while their national campaign fund is pulling ads and running low on cash — leading some campaign advisers to ask where all the money went and to demand an audit of the committee’s finances, according to Republican strategists involved in the discussions.

In a highly unusual move, the National Republican Senatorial Committee this week canceled bookings worth about $10 million, including in the critical states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Arizona. A spokesman said the NRSC is not abandoning those races but prioritizing ad spots that are shared with campaigns and benefit from discounted rates. Still, the cancellations forfeit cheaper prices that came from booking early, and better budgeting could have covered both.

“The fact that they canceled these reservations was a huge problem — you can’t get them back,” said one Senate Republican strategist, who like others spokes on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters. “You can’t win elections if you don’t have money to run ads.”

The NRSC’s retreat came after months of touting record fundraising, topping $173 million so far this election cycle, according to Federal Election Commission disclosures. But the committee has burned through nearly all of it, with the NRSC’s cash on hand dwindling to $28.4 million by the end of June.

As of that month, the committee disclosed spending just $23 million on ads, with more than $21 million going into text messages and more than $12 million to American Express credit card payments, whose ultimate purpose isn’t clear from the filings. The committee also spent at least $13 million on consultants, $9 million on debt payments and more than $7.9 million renting mailing lists, campaign finance data show.

“If they were a corporation, the CEO would be fired and investigated,” said a national Republican consultant working on Senate races. “The way this money has been burned, there needs to be an audit or investigation because we’re not gonna take the Senate now and this money has been squandered. It’s a rip-off.”

The NRSC’s chairman, Sen. Rick Scott of Florida, has already taken heat from fellow Republicans for running ads featuring him on camera and releasing his own policy agenda that became a Democratic punching bag — leading to jokes that “NRSC” stood for “National Rick Scott Committee” in a bid to fuel his own presumed presidential ambitions.

Other spending decisions, such as putting about $1 million total into reliably blue Colorado and Washington earlier this month sparked fresh questions after the committee turned around and canceled buys in core battlegrounds.

The NRSC invested heavily in expanding its digital fundraising and building up its database of small-dollar donors. But online giving to Republicans, not just the NRSC, sagged earlier this year from what consultants said was a combination of inflation, changes to Facebook advertising policies, concerns about emails caught in spam filters, and complacency with an anticipated Republican wave. Some Republicans also suspect former president Donald Trump’s relentless fundraising pitches and cash hoarding has exhausted the party’s online donor base.

 

Democrats are doing everything right currently in order to keep the Senate, and the Senate GOP is doing everything they can to help them. It's not just that Dr. Oz, Herschel Walker, Blake Masters and J.D. Vance are terrible candidates, they are abysmal ones. But the NRSC has no money to help them, just when they need to be doing so.

Now, it's still a tough road to keeping the Senate as there's plenty of dark money out there to help GOP candidates across the country and that's starting to kick in in earnest with under three months to go. But if this keeps up, Dems are going to not only pull this off, they may actually gain a seat or three.

Vote Like Your Country Depends On It, Con't

Simon Rosenberg at liberal think tank NDN finds that even right-wing 2022 polls are showing a significant shift towards the Democrats over the last two months.

This data is from their polls - Dems with big generic leads and/or big movement towards Democrats. This is what they are seeing, and this is why McConnell and others are now admitting we are in an entirely new election. Because we are.

The 2.3 point Dem lead in our post-Roe average is significant for it's believed that Democrats will need at least a 2 point national win to keep the House. A new TargetSmart report finds big increases in women registering to vote since the end of Roe.

All this data suggests that the Democrats have a bit of wind at their back and a real shot at keeping both chambers this fall. Senate polling remains very strong for Democrats, as our candidates in AZ, GA, NH and NV continue to lead in every poll taken in these states. Republicans Oz in PA and Johnson in WI have-lose-their-election kind of numbers. Vance continues to trail in OH in most polls, and while Dems are not ahead in FL and NC neither Republican is at 50. A new WI poll has Barnes up 51-44 over Ron Johnson.

In retrospect, the big Dem overperformance in the NE House special on June 28th appears to have been a harbinger that a new, bluer election was at hand, and should not have been treated as some weird outlier. It was after all actual voters voting, not a poll. Same goes for the stunning results from Kansas and another big overperformance in the MN-1 House special this past week. Three key elections with actual voters, three big overperformances by anti-extremist electorates, two in very red states.

The new climate and health care reconciliation bill should be a big boost to Democrats. It will make our closing argument stronger; lift Joe Biden's approval rating; bring the party together for the home stretch; and give us a powerful tool to reach young voters who are overwhelming Democratic but also are the most likely not to vote this year. It would be as Joe Biden likes to say "a big fucking deal." Republicans, on the other hand, are closing this election out in ways which give new meaning to dumpster fire.

Our current 2022 election toplines: The race has moved 4-5 points towards Democrats in recent weeks. The anti-MAGA majority has been awakened

• Dems have significantly overperformed expectations in 3 post Roe elections – NE and MN House specials, Kansas ballot initiative
• The Senate is leaning Dem, chances of keeping the House rising
• Lots of signs of GOP underperformance now, and the landscape is likely to get worse for GOP in coming months
• Democratic candidates have a huge cash advantage heading into the final 4 months

In November of 2021, we published a memo, Memo: 3 Reasons Why 2022 Won’t Be 2010, that posited the GOP's embrace of MAGA would make it likely that 2022 would not be a traditional midterm and Democrats could end up overperforming expectations. In May we predicted that the combination of a return of mass shootings, the ending of Roe, and the fallout from the Jan 6th Committee would reawaken the anti-MAGA majority and make this election much closer than many thought possible. In mid-June, we released an election analysis which argued we were already looking at a competitive not a wave election - that there were signs of what we call the MAGA hangover (GOP underperformance) even before Roe ended. Then Roe ended, and NDN has been at the national forefront of charting what is now clearly a new, bluer election.

 

This may be a very rosy prediction for Team Blue, and I won't be convinced until Dems win enough House seats that the inevitable efforts by the GOP to try to annul elections in order to steal the House and maybe the Senate fail, but Dems are doing what they need to be doing in order to set up wins, and Republicans are not.

 

Vote like your country depends on it, because it does.

The Drop Trou Now Ladies Party

What a shocker that everyone who warned that Republican states banning transgender women and girls from sports would be used against all girls and women in sports were correct all along.

After one competitor “outclassed” the rest of the field in a girls’ state-level competition last year, the parents of the competitors who placed second and third lodged a complaint with the Utah High School Activities Association calling into question the winner’s gender.

David Spatafore, the UHSAA’s legislative representative, addressing the Utah Legislature’s Education Interim Committee on Wednesday, said the association — without informing the student or family members about the inquiry — asked the student’s school to investigate.

The school examined the students’ enrollment records.

“The school went back to kindergarten and she’d always been a female,” he said.

To protect the student’s identity, Spatafore said he would not reveal the sport, the classification of play nor the school the student attended.

He told committee members about the events in response to their questions of whether the UHSAA, which sanctions and oversees high school activities, receives such complaints and how they are handled.

Spatafore said the association has received other complaints, some that said “that female athlete doesn’t look feminine enough.”

The association took “every one of those complaints seriously. We followed up on all of those complaints with the school and the school system,” he said during an update on HB11, a ban on transgender girls from participating in female school sports, which was passed during the final hours of 2022 General Session.

“We didn’t get to the parents or the student simply because if all of the questions about eligibility were answered by the school or the feeder system schools, there was no reason to make it a personal situation with a family or that athlete.”

The legislation, sponsored by Rep. Kera Birkeland, R-Morgan, bans transgender girls from competing in girls sports. In the event of a lawsuit, however, the bill defaults to a commission that would evaluate transgender students’ eligibility to play.

 

So now millions of girls live in states where if they don't meet "standards of femininity" and they are excellent athletes, they will be accused of being transgender and have their bodies investigated again and again to "prove they are women".

 

And millions of voters in these states are not only okay with this, they think it's 100% necessary in order to "protect girls". Note that the event happened last year, before the law was passed. We had parents so hateful that they went back to accuse a girl of breaking a law last year in order to use it against her.

 

We must beat the mantra of second-class citizenship early into women, that their bodies are uniquely subject to the state's whims, so they get used to the idea that states can mandate what those bodies are to be used for.

This is the GOP present and future.