Even with Elon Musk now safely in the fold of the Republican Party, Democrats have the fundraising edge against the GOP.
To that point, all that extra money has enabled them to buy most of their races over the last two decades.
That train fell off the rails in 2024, and it fell off in a big way.
Flushing Money
Six races in this election really stood out to me, in which Democrats invested hundreds of millions of dollars and got nothing in return, and this is in addition to the Kamala Harris debacle.
First, three seats were heavily defended when it seemed certain that they would be flipped.
This would be for Senators Tester (D-MT), Casey (D-PA), and Brown (D-OH).
Now, I don’t fault the party for spending the money to defend these seats, but perhaps they should have defended them more rather than stepping out to invest heavily in races in red states where they had no chance. The one exception to that would be Senator Tester, who should have just been fed to the wolves months ago when it became clear he was going to lose.
Brown lost his election by less than 4%, and Casey lost by only 0.5%, so that race was clearly still winnable. And if Dems hold those two seats, they quite possibly would still have the Senate.
Instead, Dems had the pipe dream of unseating Senators Ted Cruz (R-TX), Rick Scott (R-FL), and Josh Hawley (R-MO).
The closest of all those races was Allred and Cruz, with Cruz winning by 8.6% in a race with record spending on Allred, nearly $100 million by Democrats, and he still got blown out of the water.
Add in the money spent on the Scott and Hawley races as well as the $160 million used to help Tester, you have nearly half a billion spent for no reason at all other than to flush donor money down the toilet.
Over and above the other lessons offered to Dems, it now seems apparent you can no longer simply buy a race… that time has come to an end.
God forbid, the Democrats are actually going to have to listen to voters and come up with something other than abortion and immigration to fight back against Republicans.
The good news for us is that based on the post-election comments, they don’t seem ready to give that up just yet.
