If you’ve been living anywhere but under a rock recently, you know that the runoff Georgia Senate elections are nearly here. And that means all hands on deck for all parties involved.
This is precisely the message Democrat candidates Jon Ossoff and Reverend Raphael Warnock sent out to potential donors and voters this week. But rather than just asking for their vote, the pair is apparently in desperate need of continued funding.
According to NBC, campaign managers from Warnock and Ossoff joined together, “sounding the alarm” about their races’ current state.
“To win this election in 8 days, we need to continue our historic efforts to turn our every single voter – but we won’t be able to do that if our fundraising revenue continues to fall.”
Now, this may seem odd to quite a few of you, as it has been no secret that both Ossoff and Warnock have raised a whopping, if not a rather surprising amount of money for their perspective campaigns in the last few months.
Per a report from Politico, Ossoff has raised $106.8 million, and Warnock has raised $103.4 million – and that’s just in the last three months, from October 15 to December 16. In fact, Ossoff’s enormous amount of funds has given the title of best-funded Senate candidate in our nation’s history, according to The New York Times.
Comparatively, their opponents, incumbent Senator David Perdue, has earned about $68 million, and Senator Kelly Loeffler has brought in about $64 million.
And yet, according to CNN, each Republican has at least $20 million left in their coffers and is in good position cash on hand wise for the next week before the election.
Warnock and Ossoff, on the other hand, have about $16 million and $17.5 million, respectively. And sources say they will need far more if they are to continue their efforts to get more votes. According to Politico, Warnock has spent a whopping $86.1 million and Ossoff even more, at $93.5 million in the last two months.
So, where has all their funding gone? And why does it seem like they are doing such a poor job at handling their budget?
Well, according to the letter the combined campaigns wrote this past week, it’s because the Republicans have it easier.
According to NBC, they said, “Our Republican counterparts don’t have to spend as much of their precious resources on TV and can invest in the area that is most important at this stage: direct voter contact.”
Well, then maybe they should have taken a cue and done the same. As it turns out, across the nation, it seems direct voter contact has been where Democrats have failed the most.
And as you can tell from their severe House losses this year, it cost them big time. As elections for the House are finally complete, Democrats lost a total of 12 seats, nearly allowing the GOP to take control of the lower House.
Furthermore, it seems Warnock and Ossoff are not the only Democrats to have earned and spent big this year, only to lose.
As with the House, Democrats predicted they would gain Senate seats and not lose them, especially when it came to seats belonging to those like Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Senator Lindsay Graham of South Carolina, and Maine’s Susan Collins.
In each of those races, the Democrat candidate did exceptionally well when it came to funding, earning well above their opponents and garnering massive amounts of money from out of state organization and donors.
Jaime Harrison, who ran against Graham, brought in over $108 million, Collins’ contender earned nearly $70 million, and McConnell’s opponent raised more than $90 million.
And yet, at the end of the day, all three failed to oust the Republicans.
This is precisely why Warnock and Ossoff should be writing more letters and getting out there more. If their race is anything like that of those elsewhere in the nation, the odds are not in their favor.
And that is precisely why sources say that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has already given up on the Georgia race. According to NBC, Schumer has become rather “pessimistic” about his party’s odds of winning in the southern state. “Now, after the party performed poorly in down-ballot races, (Schumer), is no longer meeting with donors…”
I can’t say that I blame him. Why waste money and effort on a lost cause, no matter how close the media makes it seem.