Officials at the Democratic National Committee were hopeful heading into last fall’s elections.
Party infighting and frustrating recriminations around Democrats’ 2024 losses had made 2025 a slog. Donors were avoiding fundraising requests from the committee. DNC officials, including chairman Ken Martin, told party officials that victories that November would boost their beleaguered fundraising, especially from top donors.
Democrats won resoundingly, flipping the Virginia governor’s mansion by 15 percentage points and sweeping other key races. But big checks did not flood back.
The continued money woes, according to multiple people familiar with the party’s donor operation, caused the committee to scale back some of its plans, hamstrung by $17.4 million in debt and with only $15.9 million in the bank at the end of February.
The committee shelved some of its plans to invest in the South, a region where Martin says the party needs to expand its reach into growing areas dominated by Republicans, according to two people familiar with the plans who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal conversations. They also discarded the idea of a midterm party convention to showcase candidates because they worried there wasn’t enough money for the proposal, the sources said.
The DNC is still making other long-term investments in the South, putting the issue front and center at its ongoing spring meeting in New Orleans.
The co-chair of the DNC’s national finance committee and a committee spokeswoman denied that plans to invest in the South were pulled back because of lower-than-expected fundraising. But party officials did acknowledge top donors have been slow to open their wallets again.
“With the momentum at the end of last year, there is still some lag from 2024, but it is improving,” said Maria Cardona, a longtime Democratic communicator and member of the DNC’s powerful Rules & Bylaws Committee. “The large dollar donors are, maybe not as quickly as one would want, coming back. They are rolling themselves out of the fetal position and they are coming back to us.”
The ongoing uneasy financial position has led some Democrats to grumble that Martin began his tenure at the DNC by pledging to give $1 million every month to all 57 Democratic state and territory parties, not just those in battleground states.
“Ken was bullish on fundraising picking up,” said a person familiar with the committee’s fundraising plans. “They just have no money, and no clear path to either pay off their debt incurred by Ken, nor to fund some of the stuff he’s already announced.”
While it is common for the party in power to significantly outraise opponents, the gap between the Republican National Committee and the DNC has been dramatic since Trump took office in 2025. The Republican committee, buoyed by donors eager to stay in Trump’s good graces, ended February with $109 million in the bank — seven times what Democrats had at their disposal.
“Democrats are putting our resources into the field, building infrastructure to power wins today and for years to come, and delivering overperformances all across the country, meanwhile Republicans are losing elections at a humiliating rate in spite of their billionaire donors,” said Mia Ehrenberg, a DNC spokesperson.
Many Democrats note their party went through a similar period of slow fundraising at the beginning of Trump’s first term. Back then, the DNC also had debt; the RNC ended February 2018 with four times more cash on hand.
Party officials say success at the ballot box matters more than money in the bank. Democratic candidates have consistently overperformed over the past year — including in races where the DNC spent money — and DNC officials say their cash crunch won’t change that.
“I don’t care if the RNC outraises the DNC by seven times, because they are going to get their asses kicked in the midterms,” said Chris Korge, the DNC finance chair.
Some worry that an underfunded committee indicates lingering donor skepticism of the national party and could undercut their efforts to bounce back. The DNC is an influential arm of the party, largely tasked with improving Democratic state parties, governing an oftentimes unwieldy party and organizing the presidential nominating process.
At the national party meeting that began Thursday in New Orleans, Jay Parmley, executive director of the South Carolina Democratic Party, said a lack of cash was among the biggest challenges facing him and his colleagues this year.
“It’s money,” he said. “It’s our ability to raise money, and it’s also our ability to react quickly enough to provide these things for what is an expanding coalition every day.”
Two top DNC fundraisers, Michael Pratt and Colleen Coffey, recently left their roles in a shake-up. One person close to the DNC’s fundraising argued it would have been better to start Martin’s term with new fundraisers “not tainted by past losses” and party missteps.
While big donations to the DNC have been slow to come in, small donors are still giving generously. The DNC raised more than $5 million from donors giving $200 or less in February, similar to the RNC’s small-dollar haul that month and their own February 2022 small-dollar contributions. Martin touted the successful month by attacking Republicans for leaning on “billionaire donations” while Democrats were “proud to be powered by grassroots donors making their voices heard.”
But the RNC’s big donor advantage has helped it pull far ahead.
Between February 2025 and February 2026, during Martin’s time as chair, 30 individual donors gave at least $100,000 to the DNC, including two who gave the legal maximum of $443,000, according to finance reports. During the same time frame, the RNC recorded 233 six-figure donors, including 47 who gave maxed-out donations. The disparity echoes 2017, when Trump first took the White House and Democrats struggled to rebuild.
Ehrenberg, the DNC spokesperson, said the committee has seen growth in high-dollar donors since December, including 11 donations of over $100,000 in March that have yet to be formally reported.
Adding to the pressure: The DNC took out $15 million in loans ahead of last fall’s elections to fund the investments it said would build momentum and, in Martin’s words, “rally supporters back to the table.”
Chris Lowe, co-chair of the DNC’s national finance committee, said officials decided last year that debt was worth it in the long term. “We could spend money on the races which mattered, and then we knew we would make it up this year. And I would much prefer to be in this situation than say, we’re not going to take that debt,” he said.
A top Democratic donor said the thought that November victories would lead to a flood of cash was “a bit misguided,” but that large donors have started giving again in recent months.
The DNC’s challenges over the past year go beyond fundraising. Infighting spilled into public view early in Martin’s tenure last year when then-officer David Hogg moved to fund primary challenges against incumbent Democrats, drawing fierce blowback. The committee opted late last year not to release a much-anticipated autopsy of Democrats’ 2024 losses, suggesting it would just become a distraction.
Praveena Somasundaram contributed to this report from New Orleans.
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