Social media duo gets the final word on 'Hannity'
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Why Are Republicans
Trouncing Democrats in Fundraising?
By Byron York
The Republican president has a job approval rating around 40 percent. The GOP has an unfavorability rating around 56 percent. And Republicans trail Democrats by nine points in an average of "generic ballot" polls.
All of which makes it
notable that the Republican National Committee is trouncing the Democratic
National Committee when it comes to raising money, especially from small
donors.
The numbers are
striking. In June, the RNC raised $13.5 million to the DNC's $5.5 million.
For 2017 so far, the RNC
has raised $75.4 million to the DNC's $38.2 million.
The RNC started the year
with $25.3 million in cash-on-hand. Now it has $44.7 million. The DNC started
the year with $10.5 in cash-on-hand. Now, that has fallen to $7.5 million.
As of June 30, the RNC
reported $0 in debt. The DNC reported $3.3 million in debt.
A look inside the
numbers is even worse for the DNC. Looking at collections from small donors --
that is, those who contributed less than $200 -- the RNC raised $10.5 million
in the months of May and June. The DNC raised $5.3 million from small donors in
the same time period.
The RNC's money total is
a record -- more than was raised in any previous non-presidential election
year. That is true for June, and for all of 2017 as well.
The $75.4 million
raised this year compares to $55.4 million for the same period in 2015; to
$51.2 for the same period in 2014; to $41.1 million for the same period in
2013, and so on going back.
"It's definitely a
reflection of support for President Trump," said RNC spokesman Ryan
Mahoney. "Our small-dollar donors are giving at a record pace because they
believe the RNC is supporting President Trump, and they like that."
The obvious reason for
the Democrats' troubles is that they lost the White House, the House and the
Senate last year. Now, the party appears to have a particularly bad hangover.
One data point: In 2013, after Republicans lost their second presidential
election in a row and many believed the party faced years in the electoral wilderness,
the RNC still raised more money in the January-June period, $41.1 million, than
the $38.2 million the Democrats have raised so far this year.
There is much discussion
about the intensity of Democratic opposition to President Trump, and indeed Democrats
showed a lot of fundraising enthusiasm in the losing Georgia 06 congressional
race that turned into a referendum on the president.
But the fact is, the
passions behind The Resistance have not, or have not yet, turned into support
for the main vehicle of opposition to Trump, the Democratic Party.
Democrats have simply
not gotten over the Hillary-Bernie split that plagued the party last year. And
they have not decided what they will be in the future. Remember, this is a
party that won the White House in 2008 and 2012 on the strength of the Obama
coalition of minorities, young people, and the college educated -- the group
political journalist Ron Brownstein calls the "coalition of the
ascendant."
It's not an exaggeration to say that many believed demographics
favored them so heavily that they were virtually guaranteed Democratic
victories in the years ahead. And then the Trump victory reminded them that
there are still a lot of working-class voters in the country who aren't
necessarily natural Democrats.
This week, Democrats led
by Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer and House Minority Leader Nancy
Pelosi rolled out a new agenda, which they call "A Better Deal,"
which is designed to appeal to those disaffected voters.
And not a minute too
soon.
When a recent ABC-Washington Post poll asked, "Do you think the
Democratic Party currently stands for something, or just stands against
Trump?" -- just 37 percent said the party stands for something, while 52
percent said it just stands against Trump, and 11 percent had no opinion.
So now Democrats have a
huge job in front of them. And it is unclear whether Tom Perez, the Hillary
Clinton-backed candidate who won the DNC chairmanship in a divisive battle with
Rep. Keith Ellison earlier this year, is the man to do it.
Last month, in
explaining another dismal fundraising period for the Democrats, Perez distanced
himself from the problem. "I got here on March 1," Perez told MSNBC,
"and I was the first to say it, we've got a lot of rebuilding to do."
The new fundraising
numbers don't predict what will happen in 2018. But they do say what is
happening now.
And that is, in spite of his problems there is enough support
for Trump in the Republican base to set new small-donor fundraising records,
while Democrats have yet another measure of the work that lies ahead.
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Pseudo-Republican squishes anything but
compassionate
By David Limbaugh 
sdominick
| Getty Images
It is enormously frustrating that conservatives can't
capture the moral high ground from the phony virtue-signaling factory that is
the modern Democratic Party. Conservative policies not only work better but
also are morally superior.
Democrats depend on cliches and false narratives to
obstruct true reform — which includes shaming many Republicans from believing
enough in their own agenda to pursue it with conviction. This is nowhere more
apparent than in the endless debate over the fate of Obamacare and the future
of American health care.
It is unconscionable that Republicans are unable to
muster a simple majority to end the Obamacare monstrosity — a freakish beast
that does everything it promised not to do and does little it promised to do, a
gargantuan scam that is destroying our health care, eroding our liberty and
punishing our economy. It's a camel with its entire body already inside the
tent of the American idea — hellbent on completing Obama's plan to
fundamentally demolish it.
It's almost a waste of space to reiterate the obvious
truth that the Democratic Party is bankrupt. It is wholly out of ideas except
for concocting ever more creative ways to demonize conservatives as bigots,
thwart policies that could bring relief to the people it professes to champion,
and advance an agenda whose inevitable result is socialism — all while
pretending to believe in free market competition.
Democrats mouth such banalities as offering a
"better deal," as if they weren't the ones who have given us this
horrendous deal that is rotting the American system from the inside out.
They are incapable of offering new ideas because they are
ideologically and politically enslaved. Their worldview weds them to the
historically discredited notion that great results flow from allegedly good
intentions. And their lust for power impels them to exploit identity politics
and perpetuate victimhood for the constituencies whose overwhelming support is
essential to their political lifeblood.
For example, they can't support decentralization and
competition in education, no matter how much that could improve the lives of
minorities trapped in inferior schools, or support across-the-board tax cuts —
even though cuts for higher-income earners help stimulate economic growth,
which redounds to the benefit of middle- and lower-income earners — because
they cannot abandon their class warfare strategy.
Now back to today's more pressing issue — health care
reform. Their policies have wrought untold disaster across the board, yet they
will acknowledge no responsibility for these failures, much less join, in any
way, those seeking solutions.
Democrats tell us they would be happy to work with
Republicans to repair the glitches in Obamacare. The problem is that we are not
dealing with mere glitches. The entire legislative debacle is a galloping
cancer on our system.
Further exposing the Democrats' fraud, almost all of the
Republicans' so-called "repeal and replace" proposals have not
actually contemplated repeal at all; they've just proposed revisions. Yet
Democrats, in lockstep, will not even come to the table to discuss them. In
other words, except for their failed efforts to fully repeal the bill, all
Republican proposals have been efforts not to completely end Obamacare (sad to
say) but to partially repair it.
Democrats don't want the system improved. They know it's
a barely disguised wealth redistribution scheme that if left alone will
necessarily eventuate in a single-payer system — a euphemism for socialized
medicine.
So for now, let's forget Democrats, who have no intention
of working with Republicans on this.
What about the couple of handfuls of pseudo-Republicans
who don't have the decency to end this nightmare — the ones who campaigned on
the promise to repeal this law but won't now pull the trigger?
I don't want to hear that their consciences are involved
or that they are from liberal states. How about their intellectual honesty and
dignity?
Why do they enable Democratic propaganda that millions
would be hurt by repealing a law that forces those millions to buy insurance
against their will? Why aren't they held accountable for giving life-support to
a law that is already harming people and would result in socializing one-sixth
of our economy?
Don't you just love hearing the self-serving
protestations of these squishes, pretending to care so much about people while
they are single-handedly (as Democratic intransigence is an irremediable
reality) decimating world history's greatest health care system?
There is nothing compassionate about what Democrats and
their sanctimonious foxhole-sharing Republican frauds are doing here.
It's time for freedom-loving, people-loving Americans to
turn the tables on these charlatans and recapture the moral high ground through
aggressive and intelligent messaging.
We'll never save this republic if we
can't make the case that government largesse is fundamentally destructive and
incompetent and that the invisible hand of the market yields results across the
board that are more beneficial for more people than those of any other system
known to man.
Socialism kills, impoverishes and enslaves and only
masquerades as compassion while facilitating the compassion merchants'
consolidation of power.
Freedom brings prosperity and, if you insist on using
compassion as the be-all-end-all yardstick, is abundantly compassionate.
