Records show the Democratic National Committee had to take out another loan in February, as the 2018 midterm elections loom.
The national arm of the Democratic Party took out a $1.7 million loan in February, raising the national party’s total debt above $6 million, the Daily Caller reported. This comes as the DNC has consistently failed to keep up with its Republican counterpart's fundraising. The RNC brought in $12.8 million in February while the DNC only raised $6.9 million.
The DNC now has just over $10 million on hand compared to the $42 million the RNC has on hand. Still, RNC chairwoman Ronna Romney McDaniel expressed caution, telling Politico Wednesday that midterm elections tend to be "very difficult for a sitting president."
"Their first midterm, [parties in the White House] usually lose seats," McDaniel said. "We understand that, and so we’ve been preparing for that all year."
She said Trump has been engaged in the party’s strategy going into the 2018 elections.
"Most of our conversations are related to the midterms," she said. "In some cases, we’ll go through numbers. We take our data to the White House. He dials in. He wants to know. He’s very focused on that. We’ll talk about specific candidates, where we think that race will go, and what he can be doing to help."
The DNC is seeking to turn the page after the 2016 elections, when its financial woes led to taking out a loan from Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Clinton’s influence over the party became the subject of controversy after it came out that the DNC was working to help her in the presidential primary against Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.).
The DNC fundraising has improved since 2016–although it still lags behind the RNC’s–and DNC Chairman Tom Perez has insisted that things are going well. That insistence, however, has sometimes been misdirected, as was the case when he ran afoul of the Washington Post Fact-Checker earlier this month. Perez had said the party raised a record amount of cash in January of this year even though there were several instances in recent years when it raised more in January.
Perez said Republicans lead in fundraising because "they’ve got a lot more rich donors," but the RNC has outraised the DNC in small donations in recent years.