Things are about as bad for the Democrat Party as they’ve ever been, and before you ask, yes – it gives me great pleasure to write that.
To wit: When a political party is so broke it has to ask its own vendors to hold their invoices until after the election, the word “crisis” barely covers it. That is where the Democratic National Committee stands today, with 100 days until the most consequential midterms in a generation.
The New York Times — not a conservative outlet, not a Republican opposition research shop, but the DNC’s preferred newspaper — reported Sunday that the party asked vendors not to send bills until after November. Three people briefed on the situation confirmed it. The DNC’s own executive director tried to spin it as “standard negotiations with vendors over contracts and payment processes.” The translation is simpler: we don’t have the money and we need more time to find it.
The financial picture is as bad as any party has faced heading into a midterm in modern memory. Trump’s allied super PAC has $400 million. The RNC has nearly $130 million. The DNC is $2 million in debt — and that’s after taking out a $15 million loan last year that apparently wasn’t enough. The party that runs on other people’s money can’t manage its own.
And that’s before the truly damaging number: for more than a decade, the DNC transferred millions of dollars every election cycle to the DCCC and DSCC — the committees responsible for winning House and Senate races. Those transfers are not happening in 2026. The DNC has privately told congressional leadership there is no money to give. Every House and Senate Democrat running in a competitive district this fall is doing it without the national party backstop that has existed for over a decade.
The internal dysfunction matches the financial picture. According to more than two dozen current and former DNC officials who spoke to the Times — leaking to the press with the kind of enthusiasm that suggests they’ve given up on discretion entirely — DNC Chair Ken Martin is “gripped by fear that he will lose his job” and operating from a “vanishingly small circle of people he trusts.” In early July, he threw his phone at a junior aide’s desk during a confrontation. The incident generated a formal human resources complaint.
Martin’s response to the leaks was to hold a full staff meeting in May where he said, with apparent sincerity, “It pisses me off when I see leaks out of this building. No more of that shit.” The Times story based largely on DNC leaks published two months later.
This is the organization that is supposed to coordinate the Democratic midterm strategy, support vulnerable incumbents, drive turnout operations, and fund the ground game that flips competitive districts. It is broke, leaking, internally paralyzed, and asking vendors to wait for their checks.
Republicans have $677 million combined across their committee infrastructure. The DNC is asking for more time to pay its bills.
One hundred days. The contrast couldn’t be starker.
