My name is Will, and I’m the Deputy Executive Director of the DCCC. Today I have a critically important update to share with you.
At the very end of June, Donald Trump’s handpicked majority on the Supreme Court handed the GOP a MASSIVE boost -- ruling that Republicans can now spend UNLIMITED sums in coordination with their chosen candidates, empowering their billionaire megadonors.
This ruling delivers the GOP’s biggest campaign finance win since Citizens United, with The New York Times calling it a “major victory for Republicans” that “could undercut one of the Democrats’ financial advantages going into the midterms.”
I want to pull back the curtain a bit and explain how we got to this point. A lot of folks may think that political parties can spend unlimited sums in coordination with their candidates of choice to get them elected -- but the reality is a bit different. At least it used to be.
Before this ruling, in the post-Citizens United era of campaign finance, political parties could spend as much as they wanted to advocate for a candidate, but they had to do so independently of the candidate and their campaign. The parties were capped at how much they could spend in coordination with those candidates. For example, if the DCCC wanted to run TV ads supporting a Democratic candidate for Congress in Wisconsin, we would have to set up an independent arm of our organization that couldn’t coordinate or communicate with the campaign.
This system leveled the playing field and was fair for everyone, because political parties are allowed to take in significantly higher amounts of contributions than candidates. The limits provided a fair mechanism to prevent the ultra-wealthy from having outsized influence in our elections.
This system has been in place for decades now, and the GOP has wanted to upend it for almost as long.
The reason is simple -- a fairer system benefited Democrats. When you get bombarded with TV ads in the fall of an election year, not everyone pays the same rate for the same amount of TV ads. Right before the election, candidates actually get a lower rate than Super PACs, political parties and other groups. In recent years, Democratic candidates have been thrashing the GOP in fundraising, meaning Republicans were having to spend more to buy the same amount of ad time our candidates were able to purchase to make up for their candidate’s poor fundraising.
That meant that the caps on coordinated spending between campaigns and political parties gave Democrats an advantage -- because our candidates were funded by grassroots donors, we were able to make the GOP spend more to buy less.
When House Democrats won in 2018 and 2020, overperformed in 2022 and defied political gravity in 2024, it was in major part due to this advantage.
That’s why the GOP asked the Supreme Court to scrap the cap and allow unlimited coordinated spending on behalf of candidates -- a decision this Conservative Supreme Court seemed all too happy to grant in June. Just in time for the midterms.
I’ll be completely honest with you: This decision changes everything in the battle for House control.
House Republicans are planning to funnel their $92 MILLION war chest into propping up their most vulnerable candidates and blanketing the airwaves with attack ads to salvage their razor-thin majority this November.
They think they can rely on ultra-wealthy megadonors to funnel millions into their campaigns.
They think they’ve eliminated the advantage Democrats have had from a fairer system.
They think they’ve completely neutralized the strength of our army of grassroots donors.
Thank you,
Will, Deputy Executive Director of the DCCC
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