McCain-Feingold Helps GOP
Party Increases Its Fundraising Lead Over Democrats
By Thomas B. Edsall
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, February 7, 2004; Page A08
After one full year in effect, the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law has helped the Republican Party extend its fundraising advantage over Democrats.
As many strategists had predicted, disclosure records confirm that Republicans have done a better job of collecting thousands of limited "hard money" donations, a type of giving that soared in importance when the law took effect. The national parties no longer may accept unlimited "soft money" donations, which, proportionately, were more vital to Democrats than to the GOP.
As a result, the major Republican campaign committees ended 2003 with a huge cash advantage over their Democratic counterparts. The GOP's cash on hand minus debts exceeded $52 million on Dec. 31, far outdistancing the Democrats' $19 million, according to PoliticalMoneyLine, which tracks campaign money.
The new law has taken a bite from both parties' fundraising, but Democrats have been hit harder.
In 2003, the first full year the law was in force, the Democratic Party's national, Senate and House campaign committees fell $33 million short of their combined fundraising total from 2001 (the previous off-election year, when soft money was still allowed). Last year's take was $95 million, compared with $128 million in 2001.
Fundraising by the three corresponding GOP campaign committees, meanwhile, fell by $28 million -- from $235 million in 2001 to $207 million last year.
Analysts agree that Republicans outpace Democrats in tapping supporters willing to give from $10 to a few thousand dollars per campaign. The law allows a person to give as much as $25,000 to a party, although the average donation is far less.
Before McCain-Feingold took effect, Democrats partly closed the money gap with million-dollar donations from liberal activists in Hollywood, unions, Wall Street and elsewhere. Those big "soft money" donations are no longer allowed.
Some analysts say Democrats, all things considered, have stayed surprisingly close to Republicans in raising money. "It's amazing that they have been able to transform their fundraising mechanism and recover from a large legislative change," said Kent Cooper, who co-manages PoliticalMoneyLine.
Jim Jordan, former executive director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, said the law damaged his party. "It's not surprising that Democrats are doing better [raising hard money] than before," he said. "They have invested a lot of money in hard-money programs. But we are still at an extreme disadvantage since passage of McCain-Feingold."
Terence R. McAuliffe, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said "the dire predictions" that McCain-Feingold would devastate his party turned out to be "a fallacy."
The DNC, he said, will spend the legal maximum of about $15 million directly in behalf of the eventual presidential nominee, and "from the day we have a nominee, we will have the funds to be up in the air [with TV ads] and we will never go down" -- referring to independent expenditures supporting the nominee.
The most successful committee raising money in 2003 was the National Republican Congressional Committee. It collected more hard money last year, $72.4 million, than its total of hard and soft money in 2001, $64.5 million.
Committee spokesman Carl Forti said: "We did it by finding over 400,000 new donors. We've always been better at raising hard money than the Democratic Congressional, Democratic Senatorial and National Republican Senatorial committee[s] -- and that is only becoming more apparent as the other committees are still learning to adapt."
The Republican National Committee nearly matched its 2001 total in 2003, dropping from $114.5 million to nearly $108 million, according to figures provided by the Federal Election Commission.
The National Republican Senatorial Committee showed the least improvement from 2001 to 2003 of all the party organizations, including the Democratic committees. Total fundraising by the NRSC fell from nearly $49 million in 2001 to $26 million in 2003.
NRSC spokesman Dan Allen defended the committee's fundraising record. "Looking at this from the standpoint of cash on hand," he said, "we start 2004 with $8.9 million and no debt, leaving us in a strong position to have a positive impact on competitive races this year." He said the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee has $1.9 million in debt "with only a little cash on hand" -- $2.5 million.
All the Democratic committees have significantly boosted hard-money fundraising, and their pace was accelerating as 2003 drew to a close, the records show.
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