Republican Ohio Senate nominee J.D. Vance and three other Senate candidates traveled to Nantucket, Massachusetts for a fundraiser, hoping to rake in much-needed funds for his campaign against his opponent, Democratic Congressman Tim Ryan. After a two-day trip, Vance walked away with a relatively paltry sum of $25,000, the New York Times reports.
While the low haul for a mediocre neophyte candidate soliciting funds from established Republican donors can be explained by a number of factors–like people just don’t like Vance and his questionable backstory–the episode illustrates how desperate Republican Senate candidates in particular are, given the failure of the fundraising efforts of Republican Florida Senator and chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee and bat boy all grown up Rick Scott.
Trying to duplicate the fundraising success of Donald Trump, who used unethical and perhaps illegal methods to leech tens of millions in cash from small-dollar donors using phone solicitations, pre-checked recurring donation buttons, and ambiguously-worded pitches to hide where funds were going, Scott decided to triple-down on electronic fundraising for the 2022 cycle. The results have been disastrous to the point that the NRSC has needed handouts from the national Party to stay solvent.
An example: Scott directed the NRSC to invest $23.3 million in a campaign run from June 2021 to January 2022 to find new donors using social media outreach. The effort resulted in just $6.1 million raised, a loss of more than $17 million. While NRSC officials say the effort succeeded in getting the names and contact information of hundreds of thousands of potential donors, no significant influx of cash has occurred.
Scott directed millions to be used for Facebook and Google advertising, hoping to recreate the success of the 2020 cycle where the group spent sometimes as much as $100,000 per day. Alarmed at the spending rate, Democrats investigated to see if Republicans had found some new avenue for funding, and soon discovered the GOP was throwing money away, to the point that Republicans went from some of the top advertising on Facebook to spending virtually nothing from April to late August 2022.
The GOP/NRSC spending on digital advertising across all forms was promoted by Scott to be a way to dramatically improve Republicans’ financial stand; he was wrong. A recent campaign that asked cell phone users “Should Joe Biden resign?” charged $25 to anyone who answered “yes” to the text query. It did not say where the money was going, nor how the money was being collected. It relied on the Republican fundraising operation, WinRed, to match cell phone numbers to credit card numbers it had on file.
While the amount of contributions from that specific effort cannot be isolated, the blowback from the approach was swift, with demands for refunds quadrupling from $2 million in 2020 to $8 million so far in 2022.
In an apparent effort to preserve resources, Scott directed the NRSC to largely stay out of state Republican primaries: the group spent $30 million on ads during the 2022 primaries, about 20% less than what was spent in 2022. However, Scott’s lack of success at fundraising for the NRSC, which directs money to the coffers of Republicans in tight Senate races, has had ripple effects. Republican Senate candidates and PACs have had to cancel television advertising campaigns due to lack of funds. High-dollar donors are sitting out the general election. And Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has had to spend tens of millions of dollars from his PAC to made up the difference in key states, including funding ads for Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania and Vance in Ohio.
Scott’s effort may have also focused on the wrong touch-points with Republican donors: of the 1,500 emails and electronic solicitations the Party’s Senate election campaigns sent out so far in 2022, 60% have mentioned Trump in the subject line; zero have mentioned McConnell, and few have mentioned the group’s assumed boogeyman, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. Donors are demonstrating Trump fatigue, which is showing up in their donations and in the polls, with Republicans losing ground in special elections and losing races–like the Alaska special election for an open House seat–that were traditionally “safe Red.”
A sign about how poorly the Republican Senate effort has been run: In order to stay solvent, the NRSC needed a $10 million cash infusion from the Republican National Committee to stay afloat. Had it not received that cash, the NRSC would have been unable to pay its advertising, payroll and other obligations because it had spent 95% of all the money it raised.