As top Democrats rail against the supposed outsized influence of Republican political donors, Democratic political groups are vastly out-raising their counterparts, Politico reported on Tuesday.
"Democrats love to cast Republicans as the party of big money, beholden to the out-of-touch billionaires bankrolling their campaigns," reporters Ken Vogel and Tarini Parti noted. "But new numbers tell a very different story—one in which Democrats are actually raising more big money than their adversaries."
Among the groups reporting the biggest political ad spending, the 15 top Democrat-aligned committees have outraised the 15 top Republican ones $453 million to $289 million in the 2014 cycle, according to a POLITICO analysis of the most recent Federal Election Commission reports, including those filed over the weekend — which cover through the end of last month.
The analysis shows the fundraising edge widening in August, when the Democratic groups pulled in more than twice as much as their GOP counterparts—$51 million to $21 million. That’s thanks to a spike in massive checks from increasingly energized labor unions and liberal billionaires like Tom Steyer and Fred Eychaner.
So, even as Democrats like Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid are working methodically to turn conservative megadonors like the big-giving conservative billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch into the boogeymen of 2014, the party itself is increasingly relying on its deepest pockets as the best chance of staving off a midterm wipeout forecast by oddsmakers.
Reid’s caucus enjoys the support of a Super PAC with deep ties to the leader himself. Senate Majority PAC, as the Washington Free Beacon recently reported, is the largest outside spender this election cycle thanks to a handful of millionaires and billionaires pumping money into the political group.