Progressives Have Democrats Right Where They Want Them: Broke

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, October 22, 2025

 

The Wall Street Journal has some dire news for Democrats this morning. Not only is the GOP sitting on about $74 million more than their Democratic opponents, but the donors that could once be counted on to contribute to the party out of power are closing their wallets.

 

“At one point earlier this year, the DNC reached out to big donors to host a San Francisco–area fundraiser headlined by former Vice President Kamala Harris,” the Journal reported by way of anecdote. Not only did most “of the donors” respond in the negative, “one replied with a profanity-laced rejection.” Those who could muster a more civil response said they’d direct their political donations elsewhere until the Democratic Party “produced substantive plans to win elections.”

 

The Journal noted in its obligatory to be sure paragraph that the party that loses the last national election often tends to lag in the fundraising department. In addition, Democratic donors continue to support specific state-level candidates, including those contesting off-year statewide elections in New Jersey and Virginia. Cash is also flowing to groups advocating for mid-decade redistricting to compete with similar GOP plans in states like Texas. Nevertheless, the national party is for now unloved and forsaken by the big-dollar donor class.

 

To one progressive consultant, that’s nothing to mourn. “It’s just the people with the money are deeply out of touch with what the American people want and don’t want their party to do the things that win elections,” said Tommy McDonald, a principal with the agency Fight, which promotes candidates like Senator Bernie Sanders, New York City mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani, the theatrical congressman Gregorio Casar, and embattled Maine oysterman Graham Platner.

 

The Democratic National Committee’s headaches aren’t McDonald’s concern. As the Journal admits, the far-left candidates who make up the roster of Fight’s talent “rely on a different set of donors” — usually the small-dollar sort, who subsist on a diet of political theater and hyperbole and who some have argued contribute mightily to American political dysfunction. McDonald has few incentives to mourn the decline of a competing power center that sucks up cash that could otherwise find its way into his agency’s coffers.

 

The notion, however, that the deep pockets that invest in the national Democratic Party want to lose elections, albeit in a principled and face-saving way, is laughable self-pity dressed up as political commentary. It is yet another indication that Democrats are succumbing to a sort of fatalism that should be familiar to the GOP. “Failure theater,” “a losing club for losers,” “burn it all down” — these were the expressions of the gloomy defeatism that helped Republicans convince themselves that they only ever lost at the precise moment when the GOP had reached the high-water mark of its legislative majorities in this century. As the Republican Party’s subsequent trajectory suggests, that kind of fatalism is not necessarily an obstacle to power — even if it puts unnecessary downward pressure on margins of victory. But it often is.

 

If McDonald’s outlook prevails, it will — in the near-term, at least — beget a smaller, more radical Democratic Party. That may be just how the progressive fringe likes it, but it’s not satisfying to high-dollar donors who want their party to assemble the largest possible electoral coalition. But bigger coalitions invite the problem of ideological heterogeneity. If you’d rather have an exclusive cozy club of like minds than a political party, bigger isn’t always better.