The Democrats' Financial Situation Appears To Be Worse Than Previously Known

The Democratic Party's money problems have been an open secret for months. Federal Election Commission filings from around six months ago showed the Democratic National Committee entering the final stretch of last year with barely $12 million in its campaign account and nearly $16 million in debt, most of it stemming from a loan the committee took out the previous month. Donations had slumped just as the party needed them most.

Since then, the political environment has arguably been extremely beneficial for Democrats, with President Donald Trump's low approval ratings, the war with Iran, and high gas prices. Any one of those should have been enough to give the party the momentum necessary to get them out of their financial slump. Now, instead of turning the financial picture around, the DNC appears to be doing something stranger: hiding it.

According to a report from Axios, DNC officials required senior leadership to sign non-disclosure agreements before a private meeting on the party's finances, a departure from the committee's usual practice. Two people familiar with the conversations said the DNC requested the NDAs ahead of the recent finance meeting. The DNC asked its officers, high-ranking members of chair Ken Martin's own team, to sign the agreements, the kind of people who typically never sign confidentiality paperwork before sitting down to talk numbers.

The senior officers' meeting took place on June 25, five days before the Supreme Court handed down a ruling that upended the rules governing how parties fund their candidates. The timing alone tells its own story about how the DNC is managing its message heading into a midterm cycle it can't afford to fumble.

Martin has spent months fending off a quiet but persistent crisis of confidence among Democratic donors, operatives, and even members of his own committee, all of them watching the Republican National Committee build a fundraising advantage heading into the Nov. 3 midterms that keeps getting harder to explain away. The numbers through the end of May make the gap plain. The DNC held just under $15 million on hand against $18 million in debt, while the RNC sat on $125 million with no debt at all.

The DNC declined to comment on why it required only its officers to sign confidentiality agreements before the finance meeting, and they're trying to pass it off as inconsequential. Chris Lowe, the committee's national finance co-chair, claimed that requiring officers and board-meeting attendees to sign NDAs is standard practice in the corporate world. Lowe added that senior DNC staff already operate under confidentiality agreements and argued it would be poor practice to discuss finance and political strategy at the highest levels without them in place.

A DNC official claimed that Martin's committee has raised more money this cycle than the DNC did in 2017 and 2018, the last time Democrats headed into a midterm without the White House; however, it's not clear whether that accounts for inflation.

Ultimately, the NDA strategy will not keep the party's finances hidden, since those numbers will become public through Federal Election Commission filings. The agreements clearly exist for other reasons, such as protecting the internal deliberations, party infighting, donor threats, doubts about Martin's leadership, and any strategic response to the Supreme Court's ruling in NRSC v. FEC. The financial numbers clearly aren't good, but what the party plans to do about them is likely what they're really trying to hide.