Several Democrat donors said this week that they have paused their donations to the party because of how weak and ineffective it has become in the wake of President Donald Trump’s return to office.
“I’ll be blunt here: The Democratic Party is f***ing terrible. Plain and simple,” a major Democrat donor told The Hill. “In fact, it doesn’t get much worse.”
The donor said that the 2024 loss was much worse than the loss in 2016 because the party is currently “so weak and so diminished.”
A second donor told the publication that they were equally as turned off about the party.
“They want us to spend money, and for what? For no message, no organization, no forward thinking,” the donor said. “The thing that’s clear to a lot of us is that the party never really learned its lesson in 2016. They worked off the same playbook and the same ineffective strategies and to what end?”
Democrat strategist Steve Schale, who ran a pro-Biden super PAC during the election, told the publication that there was real burnout among donors who no longer have confidence in the party after the recent elections.
“Frankly, a lot of donors I’ve talked to don’t think their voice mattered in 2024, so I’ve been doing more listening than talking,” he said.
Democrat strategist Jamal Simmons said that donors will eventually reactivate the longer Trump is in office, likely before the 2026 elections because they will see that he is hostile to their values and that anger will drive them to open up their pocketbooks.
“For a lot of Democrats, it’s like we had a heartbreak and one way to deal with heartbreak is to curl up on your couch and eat ice cream,” he said. “But one way that will help them get over the heartbreak is how infuriating the new guy is.”
