Supreme Court ruling may wipe out Democrats’ cash advantage in Senate battlegrounds
Written by: Nolan D. McCaskill
WASHINGTON, July 6 (Reuters) – U.S. Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia is a fundraising giant who has raised more than $81 million so far this cycle and has about $33 million in campaign cash on hand, $30 million more than his rival in the November election, Republican Rep. Mike Collins.
It may not matter anymore.
Ossoff’s financial advantage in a state won by President Donald Trump in the 2024 election may have been effectively erased by the U.S. Supreme Court, which last week struck down limits on how much individual candidates can coordinate their spending with national political parties.
The Republican National Committee and the Democratic National Committee, among others, will now be able to spend unlimited funds from their major donors in coordination with political campaigns.
That could tip the playing field in favor of Republicans, whose candidates tend to raise more money from large corporate donors through national committees, over Democrats, whose candidates tend to raise more money from small individual donors.
While national committees were previously able to spend on behalf of their candidates, party officials say restrictions on coordinating their messages and strategies with individual campaigns make spending much less targeted and effective.
Democratic candidates currently hold a staggering cash advantage over their Republican rivals in competitive Senate races: $16 million in North Carolina, $9 million in Ohio and $8 million in Texas.
But unrestricted funds from the Republican Party’s national apparatus can now support belated fundraisers like Collins in Georgia and Attorney General Ken Paxton, the Republican Senate candidate for Texas.
Under current law, donors are allowed to give tens of thousands of dollars to national political committees, but their contributions to individual campaigns are limited to $7,000 per election cycle. And until Tuesday’s decision, coordinated spending for Senate races had been limited to between $130,000 and $4 million, depending on each state’s voting-age population.
Now that those limits no longer exist, Republican committees stand ready to take immediate advantage. Each entered June with more cash than their Democratic counterparts; this includes a $110 million gap between the RNC and the DNC, with $18 million in debt.
POLLS SHOW TIGHT RACES NATIONWIDE
Republicans hold a 53-47 majority in the Senate, while Democrats need to pick up four seats in the November elections to take control. Despite a positive political environment for Democrats, as high costs of living and the U.S.-Israeli war erode President Donald Trump’s popularity, winning the Senate will be an uphill battle.
While Democrats are protecting the seats Trump won in Georgia and Michigan, they are targeting Republican-held seats in North Carolina, Maine, Ohio and Alaska. They also set their sights on more Republican-leaning seats in Iowa and Texas.
A series of New York Times/Siena polls released Wednesday found Democrats ahead in North Carolina but within the margin of error in Maine, Texas, Alaska, Iowa and Ohio. Democratic candidates are outpacing Republicans in every state except Alaska and Iowa.
A pair of Fox News polls showed Ossoff leading by 13 percentage points in Georgia, while Iowa’s Senate race was within the margin of error.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote for the majority opinion Tuesday that the Supreme Court decision levels the playing field for all political parties. But in her dissent, Justice Elena Kagan said the majority bypassed Congress and rewrote its rules to get around contribution limits.
The decision allows “a party to serve as an alternative checking account for a campaign,” Kagan wrote.
REPUBLICANS WANT DISCOUNTS ON ADVERTISING
But one important element of this coordination remains unclear: whether the committees will be able to buy TV ads at the low fees offered to candidates.
The Federal Communications Commission establishes campaign advertising rules to ensure that candidates are not disadvantaged by “unfairly high advertising rates or different rates from their competitors at the end of a campaign.”
In a statement, Senate Republicans’ campaign arm said it is no longer necessary to independently produce and distribute ads without consulting campaigns on messaging, targeting or timing. And he touted better advertising rates as a benefit of the decision, saying broadcast and cable buys would be three to 13 times cheaper than the rates paid by groups outside the group.
Democrats objected to that, highlighting past comments by Trump administration lawyer Attorney General D. John Sauer in a filing to the Supreme Court in October that “the rules require broadcasters to charge low rates for candidate spending, but not for party spending—whether coordinated or independent.”
The FCC did not respond to a request for comment.
Jacquelyn Lopez and Rachel Jacobs, partners at Elias Law Group who represented Democratic groups in the Supreme Court case, spoke out against the ruling but said Democratic campaigns would benefit in the long run.
“Republicans have pushed the boundaries of coordination for years to compensate for weak campaigns and inadequate fundraising by House and Senate candidates,” they said in a statement. “Both parties are now free to offer unrestricted support to their candidates.”
(Reporting by Nolan D. McCaskill; Editing by Michael Learmonth and Edmund Klamann)
