The DNC is going broke in slow motion

I remain frustrated with the state of the DNC, for a variety of reasons that include a failure to act as a true center of the party and a seeming disinterest in learning from mistakes. Since I understand that those complaints are highly subjective and mushy, I instead want to make the case that the DNC is failing at its core role: as a fundraising entity.

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One stated goal of the current DNC is to distribute money more widely outside the battleground states (and thus, the richest state party organizations), in the State Partnership Program (https://democrats.org/news/dnc-and-asdc-announces-organize-everywhere-win-anywhere-strategy-largest-ever-monthly-dnc-investment-into-democratic-state-and-territory-parties/). Not all this money is federal, so only some of it is showing up in the FEC filing. In their April filing, 1.2 million dollars in federal money went to the state parties. However, around half of that was PA alone (43%, $525k), which is presumably a ramp up to the midterm elections investment. These spending commitments lock the DNC into ~1.2 million (across federal and nonfederal dollars) per month, around a tenth of its overall fundraising.

Payroll is one of the largest expenses, at 1.44 million, across ~249 employees this pay period. This appears to have been flat since the end of last year, with the total # of employees about the same as November 2025 [if you run this analysis yourself, you’ll probably initially get a larger number, because payroll is reported both as a bulk payment to Rippling, the payroll processor, and then again as payments to individuals. This is a duplication of the same spending]. If you add on the other payroll-associated expenses (benefits, taxes, etc), you land around 2.7 million for staffing costs.

The total amount of fixed, non-discretionary costs (the two above expenses, plus office rent, legal compliance, data and technology subscriptions, but not advertising in any form) lands around 6.4 million total. That is (approximately) half the DNC’s monthly fundraising amount committed off the bat to fixed costs.

It’s tricky to accurately measure fundraising costs from an FEC filing. You can get dollars paid to vendors, for ads or texts or similar, but you can’t easily track staff time, or figure out exactly how much of an ad dollar went to fundraising versus persuasion. We are slightly lucky here in that the March 2026 DNC has no particular reason to be running a large persuasion campaign (and we can observe transfers to state parties that seem to be for that purpose), which makes me feel good about attributing all ad spending to fundraising. There’s also direct mail, which is again uncertain but probably donation requests.

Direct mail alone comes to ~1.96 million in March, and digital fundraising plus texts and other online stuff is a further ~2.7 million. The total here lands around 4.7 million- around 41% of the 11.4 million raised in March. It’s worth noting that this fundraising efficiency is the worst in the 14 month window I checked, and the average is more like ~23% efficiency, but it varies a ton. Notably, the DNC is spending more on fundraising in 2025, while raising less. This may be an early in the year aberration, but it doesn’t look great.

At the March fundraising efficiency, the DNC needs to raise 10.9 million to cover fixed costs. At the average efficiency, it needs to raise 8.3 million to cover fixed costs.

This is not great news for an organization whose fundraising looks like this

If you look closely, the thing currently propping up the DNC is a fifteen million dollar loan reflected on the October 2025 filing. The committee has around 18 million in total debt as of the most recent filing. The low September/October fundraising numbers are in spite of an increased amount of spending on fundraising activity, although it is possible this is miscategorized spending on the elections or fundraising for other groups.

Adding this breakdown to fundraising numbers, and excluding transfers from other committees to focus on individual donations, actually makes the DNCs fundraising efficiency look worse- March goes from 11.4 million total to around 7.5 million of individual donations, for a dire 60% of every dollar raised going to pay for fundraising. Ow.

You can spend a long time failing to raise money and taking out loans, and it’s likely that the midterm runup will be a fundraising bump. I don’t think the DNC is going to collapse tomorrow.

However, this financial picture is dire. The combination of high fixed expenses and slow fundraising, despite significant investments in that fundraising, paints a picture of a lifeless entity barely holding on. This is all particularly ironic in the context of Ken Martin’s goals of giving money to the state parties, since you can’t give away what you don’t have. Much has been made about the need for a stronger (or less hollow) party, but the DNC is in no shape to be a strong anything.