The parties’ hard money success since 2002 has come about because the parties replaced soft money with (a) money from small donors coming into all six committees, (b) money from Members of Congress to the four Hill committees, and (c) money from presidential candidates’ joint fundraising committees coming into the RNC and DNC. More about each of these points will come later.
If asked to predict, we would expect the parties to continue their record fundraising through the full two year cycle. We note that even though the parties in 2004 and 2008 were behind 2000 at the eighteen month mark, both of these elections showed the parties raising more in hard money over the full two-year cycle than the parties had ever before raised in hard and soft money combined (see Table 4 and 5.)
However, this does not mean all six committees are doing equally well. The DNC and RNC are financially strong. The four congressional committees look well compared to years past, but none has the money yet to counter the greatly expanded barrage of non-party independent spending that is likely to come in key races after Labor Day.
