Democrats roll out multimillion investment in six battleground states

The Democratic National Committee (DNC) is preparing to spend millions of dollars in six battleground states in a bid to expand the electoral map for the party’s eventual presidential nominee. 

The multimillion-dollar investment will go toward adding new infrastructure and organizers in Arizona, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — six states that President Trump carried in the 2016 presidential election and that Democrats see as key to defeating him in November.

The DNC funding, the first installation in the party’s 2020 battleground spending, will allow the party to add new field offices and organizers in the battleground states, and expand its on-the-ground data operations, according to multiple committee officials. 

The overarching goal of the investment is to give the eventual Democratic presidential nominee an assist after what is expected to be a long and potentially bruising primary season, as well as to help boost Democratic candidates down ballot.

Committee officials noted that the DNC could add new spending and states to its list of battlegrounds and that the electoral map could shift throughout the cycle.

The early investment is a change from 2016, when the party had no comparable program in place to assist Hillary Clinton in scaling up her political operations after she secured the presidential nomination. 

A DNC official said that past presidential campaigns had urged the committee to begin laying critical political infrastructure early so that the eventual nominee could hit the ground running after the party’s national convention in July.

“In the 2016 race and in past campaigns, they’ve all stressed to us that the most important thing the DNC can do is lay the groundwork for the nominee to come in and build up dramatically,” the official told reporters on a conference call.

To be sure, the eventual nominee will have to compete in the general election with the political behemoth run by Trump and the Republican National Committee (RNC), which has already sought to expand its presence in the same six battleground states targeted by the DNC. 

The RNC has repeatedly outraised the DNC. In the fourth quarter of 2019 alone, the Republican committee raked in $72.3 million, blowing past the $28 million raised by the DNC in the same time frame.

There is a silver lining for Democrats, however. The DNC and the party’s presidential candidates combined to raise $580 million in 2019, beating out the Trump campaign and RNC, which raised a combined $463 million over the course of the year.