Democrats have been raining cash on their presidential nominee like it’s confetti.
Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign raised $204 million in July — more than four times the $48 million former President Donald Trump brought in, according to new filings with the Federal Election Commission. This was enough to erase the Republican nominee’s previous cash advantage; at the start of August, Harris had $220 million in cash on hand, while Trump held just $151 million.
Official data on August fundraising has yet to be released. But there’s reason to believe that Harris’s money advantage grew last month, due in part to the Democratic National Convention. According to the Democrat’s campaign, it raised $540 million in the first six weeks since President Joe Biden handed off the nomination.
Yet this torrential downpour of campaign cash hasn’t trickled down the Democratic ballot: Even as Harris has begun outraising Trump, the Republican committee responsible for funding GOP state legislative candidates has amassed far more money than its Democratic counterpart.
From January 2023 through the second quarter of this year, the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee (DLCC) — the body tasked with electing Democratic state legislators — had raised $35 million, according to the committee. Over the same period, its GOP rival, the Republican State Leadership Committee (RSLC), had raised $62 million.
Those figures do not include the fundraising of party-aligned outside groups that focus on state legislative races. In recent years, progressive organizations such as The States Project and Forward Majority have spent large sums on state-level races. It’s possible that when super PACs are taken into account, the GOP loses its apparent cash advantage. Then again, there are also conservative outside groups, such as Americans For Prosperity Action, that invest in down-ballot elections. What we know for sure is that, when it comes to the parties themselves, Republicans are outraising Democrats in the fight for statehouses.
That fight is often neglected by the national spotlight — but it can have profound implications for Americans’ daily lives.
The Harris campaign appears to be conscious of its party’s down-ballot challenges. This week, it transferred $2.5 million of its own funds to the DLCC. Yet that largesse scarcely narrows the RSLC’s cash advantage.
Ultimately, only Democratic donors can ensure that the GOP enjoys no down-ballot edge. Given blue America’s current enthusiasm and engagement, this should be possible — at least, if liberals come to appreciate the high stakes, and low cost, of winning state legislative races.
In our nation’s federal system, a great deal of policy is set at the state level. It is a state’s governor and legislature — not Congress — that primarily determines its public education spending and housing policies.
As the parties have polarized ideologically, so have policy outcomes between states with Democratic and Republican governments. Whether Democrats or Republicans wield power in a given state can determine whether its working-class families have access to affordable health insurance, or its parents receive paid leave, or its labor unions can fend off rapid decline.
In the wake of the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v.Wade, the stakes of state legislative elections became even higher. Throughout much of the country, the right to an abortion has become contingent on the outcomes of down-ballot races.
All 22 states that currently ban abortion — or restrict access to the procedure more tightly than Roe did — have GOP-controlled state legislatures. Meanwhile, all 16 states that have enacted new abortion protections since the end of Roe are governed by Democrats.
Arizona narrowly averted a near-total ban on abortion this year, thanks largely to the Democratic Party’s large minorities in both the state Senate and House. When the Supreme Court overturned Roe, the state’s 1864 abortion law went into effect. Only five of Arizona’s Republican state legislators supported repealing that archaic statute. But this was enough to enact a law overturning it, as Democrats lay claim to 29 of the state’s 60 House seats and 14 of its 30 state senators.
Still, a ban on abortions after 15 weeks remains in effect in the state. A November ballot measure could nullify that law by enshrining abortion rights into the state’s constitution. If it fails, however, Democrats could also expand abortion rights legislatively by flipping a tiny number of state legislative seats.
If the stakes of state legislative races are high, the cost of meaningfully influencing their outcomes can be remarkably low.
In 2022, Democrats won control of the Minnesota state Senate by a single seat — which Democratic state Sen. Judy Seeberger won by just 321 votes. Seeberger’s campaign cost $123,992, while her Republican opponent raised $137,143. In a race that tight and inexpensive, it’s conceivable that a dozen small-dollar donations could have tipped the balance in Seeberger’s favor.
Whatever the exact cost of Seeberger’s narrow victory, her donors got an extraordinary bang for their buck. With their single-vote Senate majority, Minnesota Democrats established paid family and medical leave, barred non-compete clauses in labor contracts, banned employers from holding compulsory anti-union meetings, bolstered workplace protections for meatpacking and Amazon workers, formed a statewide board to set minimum labor standards for nursing-home workers, directed $2.58 billion into improved infrastructure, made school breakfast and lunch free for all Minnesota K-12 students, restored the voting rights of ex-felons, invested $1 billion into affordable housing, imposed background checks on private gun transfers, initiated a red-flag warning system to remove firearms from people courts deem to be a threat to themselves or others, legalized recreational marijuana, and mandated that utilities go carbon-free by 2040, among other measures.
Were it not for 321 votes — and quite plausibly, a few thousand dollars of campaign contributions to Seeberger — few, if any, of these reforms would have passed. What’s more, it’s possible that Seeberger’s victory was also responsible for Gov. Tim Walz’s ascent to the Democratic ticket: Thanks to Minnesota’s flurry of legislating, Walz became a nationally renowned progressive darling, which might well have put him on Harris’s radar.
This November, Democrats have a chance to replicate their 2022 triumph in Minnesota. The party has an outside shot at winning a narrow majority in Pennsylvania’s state Senate, thereby giving the party a trifecta in the Keystone State and unlocking all manner of liberal reforms.
The party also has a chance of accomplishing a similar feat in Wisconsin, where GOP gerrymanders had previously all but guaranteed Republican state legislative control. Last year, the state’s Supreme Court declared such gerrymanders unconstitutional, and forced the composition of new electoral maps that feature a roughly even split of Democratic-leaning and Republican-leaning districts.
In Michigan and Minnesota, meanwhile, the party is fighting to defend existing trifectas, and enable further policy gains.
Democratic donors’ fixation on presidential politics is understandable. The stakes of keeping Donald Trump out of power are certainly high. But tossing another $20 (or even $2,000) onto Harris’s $540 million pile is much less likely to meaningfully change Americans’ lives than making a similar contribution to a pivotal state legislative campaign. At the national level, the cost of progress is exorbitant. In the right down-ballot races, however, it retails at a steep discount.
