The American Democrats are at each other’s throats and have a money problem

The US Democratic Party has sorted out the huge mess it made in Maine – where a candidate for the Senate, Graham Platner, who had indeed generated ‘momentum’, as election advisers love to say, but who had posted racist and misogynistic comments, sported a Nazi-inspired tattoo on his chest and had an unhealthy relationship with women – one of whom accused him of sexual harassment, the final nail in the coffin of his candidacy. Now his replacement is Troy Jackson, who holds similar views to Platner but is not accused of harassment (he has a bad temper, shouts and throws things at meetings) and must tackle two problems: the ‘momentum’, as it were, which had not materialised for him, and the money, of which there is very little. His Republican rival, the moderate conservative Susan Collins, who has been a senator for 28 years, has $11 million in her campaign war chest; Jackson has just one. 

Money has become a structural problem for the Democratic Party, and internal feuds are only making it worse: we are in the primary phase, so clashes are to be expected, but for this round of mid-term elections (voting takes place in November), hostility is sky-high. The party’s most left-wing faction is selecting combative and extremely radical candidates who seem set to shatter any possibility of coexistence within the Democratic Party’s broad coalition with the moderates, who are accused of being in the pocket of the establishment and the oligarchs. Thus, ideology and money – or rather, a lack of it – become intertwined and are consumed in a clash that some within the Democratic Party are beginning to regard as genuinely counterproductive: can’t everything be put off until after November? In Michigan, where the Senate primaries are due to take place on 4 August, this conflict is more visible than ever. On Monday evening, the second televised debate between the two Democratic candidates, Haley Stevens and Abdul El Sayed, took place in Detroit; the former is backed by the establishment, whilst the latter was selected by Fight Agency, the communications and strategic consultancy firm that engineered the success of New York’s mayor Zohran Mamdani and which, in this election cycle, is selecting, supporting and building the most radical candidates (Platner in Maine, too, was a creation of Fight Agency and, in particular, of the wunderkind Morris Katz). During the debate, Stevens and El Sayed clashed mainly over support for Israel – she receives funding from the country’s leading Jewish lobby, AIPAC; he denounces ‘the genocide in Gaza’ and supports the Palestinian liberation struggle – and over funding from large corporations, which she accepts and he rejects, whilst describing himself not as a socialist but as ‘a capitalist who knows how capitalism works’. The fault lines among the Democrats are becoming ever clearer and deeper, but as is often the case in such situations, it could be their rivals who stand to gain: a few hours before the debate, Donald Trump took part in a rally with the man thought to be the Republican candidate for the Senate seat in Michigan, Mike Rogers, cunningly rambling on more about “communists” than about Israel, whilst emphasising that there is significant backing for Rogers because an opportunity has emerged that did not exist until a few months ago: this seat has been held by a Democrat for 25 years. And whilst the Senate seat in Maine must be won if the Democrats are to have any hope of securing a majority in the Senate (they still need two more seats), it is clear that the one in Michigan cannot be lost; otherwise, the Republicans will end up increasing their influence.

Without money, however, it is difficult to run election campaigns, even in this ultra-modern era where ‘energy’ reigns supreme. A few days ago, the New York Times reported on the discontent within the Democratic National Committee’s offices – including an incident where the committee’s chairman, Ken Martin, threw a telephone, which shocked the younger staff, and a request to suppliers to allow payment of invoices after the election, in an attempt to mask the financial problems and perhaps resolve them with a strong showing at the polls. The New York Times, however, writes: “The Democratic Party and its allies are far behind the Republican Party when it comes to money. Trump controls a $400 million super PAC and the Republican National Committee is sitting on a war chest of $130 million. The Democratic National Committee is $2 million in debt.” And of course the president is raking in money in ways that border on (and perhaps go beyond) the limits of legality; of course the oligarchs have aligned themselves with the White House to avoid any hassle, and of course it’s a rigged race, but getting the candidate selection wrong, mistaking the energy at rallies for a source of funding, and ending up with a million-dollar deficit is a slightly risky way to compete with the intractable Trump.