Tag: NRSC

September fundraising numbers for the four party committees:

Note that these figures do not include recent loans obtained by the DCCC ($15 million) and the NRCC ($8 million). I would expect their Senate counterparts to take out loans as well.

While we don’t yet know the details of the NRSC and the DSCC’s spending this month, the DCCC has made about $19.6 million worth of independent expenditures so far in October according to our IE tracker. By contrast, the NRCC has only spent about $6 million on IEs so far in October.

First they’re in, then they’re out, and now… they’re back in:

The National Republican Senatorial Committee has reversed an earlier decision to cancel its last two weeks of advertising in Louisiana. Instead, it has purchased TV time next week and will wait to decide whether to buy the final week before Election Day. The decision comes on the heels of GOP polling showing that Sen. Mary Landrieu (D) has only a mid-single digit lead over challenger John Kennedy (R). Democrats dispute those numbers, arguing that Landrieu holds a substantial lead.

If the NRSC wishes to waste their money on Kennedy instead of Chambliss or McConnell, well, that’s fine by me.

UPDATE: Roll Call says the committee is placing a $500K buy for the next week, with no commitment yet for a second and final week of ads.

LATER UPDATE: Aside from the initial bad press that the NRSC gave Kennedy by pulling out in the first place, a late play like this one reminds me of the boneheaded move by the NRSC in 2006 to spend a million bucks against Debbie Stabenow in a last-minute ad buy when that money could have been funneled into Montana or Virginia instead.

After days of rumors, Ambinder confirms it — the NRSC is retreating from Colorado:

Republican sources in Colorado and Washington say that the National Republican Senatorial Committee plans to pull out of the state by next week, an acknowledgment that its independent expenditure resources would be better spent on defense elsewhere. […]

The NRSC is still helping Roger Wicker in Mississippi and incumbents Norm Coleman in Minnesota, John Sununu in New Hampshire.

AN NRSC spokesperson said that advertising decisions are made on a week-to-week basis and declined to comment further.

How do you like them apples, Dick Wadhams?

This decision comes on the heels of the party’s move to cut the cord on dud candidate John Kennedy in Louisiana in order to play more defense. Will it be too little, too late to prevent catastrophic damage?

The vaunted McCain campaign “re-boot” is now in its second day, and at this point it’s looking like they’re just hitting ctrl-alt-delete over and over again as white smoke pours out the back of the computer… and their malaise seems to be dragging down the Congressional ballot too. Perhaps that comes as no surprise to us in the lefty blogosphere, but now mainstream purveyors of the conventional wisdom are starting to move this story to the forefront, such as Politico, with not one but two stories on this front today.

For starters, the NRSC is getting a financial bailout of its own: from the RNC. (Talk about robbing Peter to pay Paul.) The RNC is prepared to tap its $5 million line of credit, not to save McCain but to head off the possibility of a 60-seat Democratic caucus in the Senate with huge ad buys of their own.

And with the House and Senate Republican campaign committees being drastically outspent by their Democratic counterparts, and outside groups such as Freedom’s Watch offering far less help than was once anticipated, Republicans are turning to the national party committee as a lender of last resort.

A decision is imminent because television time must be reserved and paid for upfront, and available slots are dwindling.

This won’t be a direct allocation of funds to the NRSC, since the NRSC and RNC are prohibited by law from coordinating independent expenditures (such as where to run ads or their content). But the RNC can easily deduce from previous NRSC buys and public polling where their advertising help is needed. This money isn’t coming out of funds that were previously designated for McCain, but it’s telling that for the home stretch they’d rather tap their emergency stash for Senate triage, rather than bolstering McCan’t’s fading chances. (As an indication how far we’ve come, I idly speculated on this very possibility back in June, and got laughed out of the building.)

Politico also delves into the corresponding mess at the NRCC, where highly touted recruits like Darren White (NM-01) and Erik Paulsen (MN-03) are apparently being left to fend for themselves in the coming weeks as the NRCC’s meager holdings are divvied up among endangered veterans.

I did a bit of a double-take when seeing the example they gave:

GOP Reps. John B. Shadegg of Arizona, Lee Terry of Nebraska, Henry Brown Jr. of South Carolina and Dan Lungren of California are all fighting for their political lives, a reversal of fortunes that has caught even the most astute campaign observers by surprise.

The GOP is publicly confessing to being worried about the challenges posed by Linda Ketner (SC-01) and Bill Durston (CA-03)? Either this is the most monumental of all head-fakes, or they’re looking up at a tsunami that even we at SSP are underestimating. Other names cited in the article as causes for concern include Lee Terry, Mark Souder (both victims of recent huge DCCC expenditures), Dana Rohrabacher, David Dreier, and Brian Bilbray, all of whom would be well behind a GOP firewall any other year.

Both the Democratic House and Senate committees have been spending furiously. The NRSC continues to rally, but they’ve basically ceded a two-month head start to the DSCC in some races.

In a terse statement stained with his own personal disgust, NRSC Chair John Ensign lambasted his GOP Senate colleagues today for failing to financially support his committee:

“I recently challenged my colleagues to step up to the plate and help me provide the resources our candidates need to compete in races across the country – to match the [Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee] expenditures in targeted races,” Ensign said in a statement. “It has become clear that my call has gone largely unanswered. I have no control over the timing or content of IE ads, but I have had no choice but to decrease the total budget of our IE Unit. It is still my hope that my Republican colleagues will engage in this election and help match what the Democrats are doing. If they do, I will adjust our budget accordingly.”

CQ Politics notes that Republican Senators have only contributed $1.1 million to the committee through June, while Democrats have forked over a much more generous $5 million.

Ensign’s failures as NRSC chair are already having immediate consequences. From the Politico:

The NRSC reserved about $6 million in ad buys in North Carolina, according to sources from both parties, which was meant to show that the GOP was ready to play hard in what has become a dead heat race between Dole and Democratic challenger Kay Hagan.

But on Wednesday the NRSC yanked the money because, it turns out, the dough was never available in the first place. One GOP Senate source said it was a “head fake” that pulled the rug out from under Dole. But Dole told Politico in a phone interview Thursday that she realizes in this tough national climate for Republicans that she’s on her own in the race and will have to raise all her own money without relying on the NRSC.

As the polls show, Dole could really use a boost right about now. Too bad for her, the NRSC is hamstrung due to the stinginess of her GOP colleagues. This is what I like to call schadenfreude at its most delicious.

Enjoy the pain, Republicans. You bastards deserve it.

Here’s the damage:

The NRCC had a great July, but they’re still facing a huge disparity with the DCCC. Even at this clip, they’re never going to come close to running even with the D-trip.

On the Senate side, the DSCC is flexing its money advantage early, spending a generous $8.5 million in July. We’ll likely see similar (or perhaps even bigger) expenditures in August, with the DSCC going all-out in Oregon, Mississippi, North Carolina, and Colorado.

Proof that Jeff Merkley is gaining fast in his quest to be the next Senator from the great state of Oregon increases by the day.  In the latest, the Oregon GOP goes after Merkley’s supposed campaign finance violations and then puts up a pathetic website attempting to smear Merkley’s tax record.  More below the jump.

Cross-posted from Loaded Orygun: http://www.loadedorygun.net/sh…

The first item today is an ad put out by the NRSC opposing Jeff Merkley’s appearance in some issue ads sponsored by the OR D’s:

The ad makes referrence of a website (http://www.musttaxmerkley.com/) which supposedly proves Merkley has a pro-tax increase record.  Some facts:

1. The newest article on this page is nearly four months old.  Oh and as I was writing this, their site went down…

2. If you go to the “Jeff Merkley’s Record” page, they give two examples of how Merkley supposedly supports higher taxes and bad budget policies  The second is his vote for a renovation of the State Capitol, which was supported by both parties.  Trust me when I say that the pipes were in bad enough condition that the water that came out of them was brown, not to mention other problems the building had.

Enjoy the smell of fear folks, they’re reeking of it.  

You all knew it was inevitable: at some point, Democratic donors, exhausted by the finally-concluded presidential primary and looking into their empty wallets, would take a little breather from giving, allowing the GOP to play catch-up.

Fear not, though, fellow downballot enthusiasts: most of the damage occurred at the DNC vs. RNC level. The DSCC and DCCC had still slightly better months of May than their Republican counterparts, and they maintain towering edges in cash-on-hand.

Committee	May Receipts	May Disbursements	May Cash-on-Hand	May Debts & Obligations
DSCC (est.)	$5,920,000.00	$4,950,000.00	$38,530,000.00	$0.00
NRSC (est.)	$4,890,000.00	$2,700,000.00	$21,560,000.00	$0.00
DCCC	$6,091,737.14	$4,192,275.05	$47,174,105.00	$0.00
NRCC	$5,017,140.54	$5,096,869.15	$6,654,801.50	$0.00
DNC	$4,795,890.97	$5,263,698.72	$3,965,886.11	$6,306.93
RNC	$24,377,740.11	$11,513,030.77	$53,508,001.57	$0.00
Total Democrats	$16,807,628.11	$14,405,973.77	$89,669,991.11	$6,306.93
Total Republicans	$34,284,880.65	$19,309,899.92	$81,722,803.07	$0.00

Ordinarily, I wouldn’t worry too much about the DNC/RNC chasm: the DNC has consistently lagged the RNC lately. That points to one of the most remarkable things about the Obama campaign: for most people, the Obama website has become top-of-mind for direct giving, leading to a bypass of the DNC.

One potential warning sign I see on the horizon, though, is the RNC turning around and allocating a lot of its money to Congressional races, as it realizes that its last best shot at preventing Democratic hegemony is in the Senate by holding GOP losses to 3 or 4 there. If polling continues to go south for McCain along the same trajectory as the last couple weeks, it’s not out of the question that the RNC will consider writing down the McCain campaign as a casualty loss, in order to bolster the likes of Gordon Smith and Roger Wicker.

The NRCC is way, way behind the DCCC in cash on hand… $6.73 million to the DCCC’s $45.27 million as of the end of April. A lot of that probably has to do with big money donors sitting on their wallets, seeing that an investment in the NRCC is about as likely to pay dividends as an investment in that nice man from Nigeria needing your help with his bank account problems. Some of that gap, however, went toward paying for the renovations on Christopher J. Ward’s house.

Politico is reporting today that Ward, the NRCC’s former treasurer, diverted up to $725,000 from the NRCC to his own purposes over the course of six years. (This goes all the way back to Tom Davis’s turn at the NRCC’s helm, so it can’t all be pinned on Tom Cole being asleep at the watch.) Money that was supposed to be used to pay for galas where the President fund-raised for Congressional GOPers instead… well…

Court documents filed by DOJ charge that Ward diverted more than $500,000 from the President’s Dinner accounts to his own use, using the funds to pay his mortgage and to finance nearly $200,000 worth of home renovations.

Original NRCC estimates of how much Ward may have appropriated were along the line of $500-600K, but the NRCC’s outside auditors confirmed today that the actual damage was $725,000. In addition, Ward managed to grab $28,000 from the NRSC via joint fundraising activities and $47,000 from other GOP leadership PACs, for a total of almost $800,000. (Not to mention the $530,000 the NRCC has spent on lawyers and accountants tracking down the fraud!)

“It was important to get to the bottom of what happened,” House Republican Leader John A. Boehner said. “Clearly, it’s not nearly as bad as many of us said it might be.”

Well, it probably is a relief… to the extent that no one higher-up than Ward was found to have been engaged in any embezzling. As for the number of close races coming in November that could have been turned around with that $800,000, the damage can’t be calculated yet.