Democrats and GOP Make Competing Cases on State Party Spending

The Democratic National Committee (DNC) said it put more than $1 million a month into state parties over the past 21 months, describing it as part of a buildup of staff, data, and voter outreach ahead of Election Day.

In a memo released on Nov. 2, DNC Chair Ken Martin said the committee sent each of the 50 state parties $17,500 a month. Parties in Republican-controlled states got an extra $5,000 a month through what the DNC calls its Red State Fund.

According to the memo, state parties used the money to open field offices, hire organizers, run voter registration drives, and start coordinated campaigns earlier. They also added staff in areas including voter protection, data, and communications.

“This consistent funding built critical infrastructure in every state and helped Democrats compete everywhere while greatly expanding the battleground map,” Martin wrote.

The memo lists a range of other programs. DNC volunteers made 3.3 million calls and sent 19.2 million texts. A separate effort, called Local Listeners, made 450,000 calls to Democrats who voted in 2020 but sat out 2024. Its aim was to turn those voters out in 61 battleground districts.

The DNC said it held more than 250 training sessions with 25,000 Democrats in all 50 states. It described a paid voter registration pilot as the largest partisan registration effort in its history.

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According to the memo, the pilot registered more than 7,200 voters in Arizona and nearly 2,000 in Nevada.

The DNC said 37 states now have voter protection programs, up from five last year. It said its legal team filed 34 amicus briefs in cases over Justice Department demands for state voter files.

On fundraising, the memo says the DNC has more than 1 million unique small-dollar donors this cycle. It says the committee had its best third quarter of a midterm year, raising $3.6 million more than in 2022 and $7.2 million more than in 2018.

Martin has argued that cash on hand is the wrong scorecard, saying the DNC chose to spend early on building infrastructure. He made that case in a July post on the DNC’s Substack.

RNC National Press Secretary Natalie Baldassarre said in a statement to The Epoch Times that the Republican approach has produced stronger state parties, while the DNC has used its resources inefficiently.

“Republicans have strategically invested in our state parties and incentivized them to become self-sufficient, creating stronger organizations and better-trained staff that result in more Republican victories up and down the ballot,” Baldassarre said.

The RNC said it has a department, State Party Strategies, that helps state parties with political strategy, communications, data, finance, and election integrity.

Through a program called Growing Republican Organizations to Win, which works with each state party’s leadership to set goals, state parties received more than $2.5 million in incentives, according to the RNC.

The RNC said the department has held more than 400 sessions with 53 state and territory parties, training more than 9,000 people. It also held four regional fly-in trainings for more than 250 party leaders, the RNC said.