The Republican National Committee is finishing moving more than $50 million to the groups overseeing the party's efforts to elect House and Senate candidates, the committee told The New York Times — a cash infusion significantly larger than what Republicans have done in the past, landing in the final two weeks of the midterm campaign.
The RNC entered September with an enormous $126 million on hand. The move is possible because of this year's Supreme Court ruling in National Republican Senatorial Committee v. FEC, decided June 30, in which the Court struck down the federal limits on how much a political party can spend in coordination with its own candidates, holding that the restrictions violated the First Amendment. For the first cycle in decades, the party can put its money directly behind its candidates' campaigns instead of spending at arm's length — and the largest share of its coordinated spending, $56 million, is going to canvassing and voter-turnout operations, with a further $27 million devoted to election integrity work.
"The cash infusion, significantly larger than what Republicans have done in the past, is something that the troubled and financially struggling Democratic National Committee is incapable of doing." — The New York Times
That last point is the strategic story. The Democratic National Committee, troubled and financially struggling, cannot answer the transfer in kind — leaving Democratic House and Senate candidates to be out-resourced at the national-party level precisely when campaigns spend hardest: the final fortnight of advertising, field operations and ballot chasing. Party strategists have long argued that channelling money through the party itself produces more disciplined spending than scattering it across outside super PACs; this cycle is the first real test of that theory at full scale.
The transfer adds to a Republican financial advantage that runs through every level of the cycle — a flush national committee, a president who says he has spent or plans to spend more than $400 million of his own political money supporting Republicans, and now a legal framework that lets the party coordinate all of it with the candidates on the ballot. With control of both chambers of Congress at stake on November 3, the RNC's money is the party's closing argument.