How Will Trump's Takeover of the RNC Affect the Election?
March 11, 2024
Campaigns are both art and science, simultaneously operating in concert and at odds. The science side, embodied in the “data folks,” analyze which messages work in which communities, how to mobilize volunteers, and determine the best way to spend each dollar. The art side, personified by the media team (including digital/social media), take the candidate’s stances and weaves a message that encourages voters to buy into the candidate and project their hopes onto them.
Today’s dismissal of several dozen RNC staffers threatens to make Trump’s bid to defeat President Biden tougher. We are less than eight months to the election and a layoff of this magnitude is quite rare. Considering that the RNC has only $8 million cash on hand, roughly a third of what the DNC has, it looks like Trump is prioritizing the consolidation of power more than competent campaign staff.
The most dangerous predator in the world is one that is cornered and injured. Trump is both.
Fundamentally, campaigns are questions of resource allocation. An estimated $10 billion will be spent on the election, with the presidential contest receiving nearly three billion, according to AdImpact. The biggest question for non-campaign expenses will be how Trump’s legal fees factor into the equation. His SuperPAC, his PAC, and the NRC have already paid $50 million in legal fees. That money would be a substantial portion of some of the most expensive Senate races from 2022.
Lara Trump has already indicated that money will be moving to “election integrity efforts.” This would have to come at the expense (pun not intended) of other key priorities, such as volunteer mobilization, field staff, and the like. Once you start to look at costs associated with a national campaign, a billion dollars is eaten up pretty quickly.
Currently, Trump’s legal bills are approximately half a billion dollars, including over $350 million in legal judgements alone. While Trump has pledged not to take a dime of RNC money to pay for legal bills, the RNC has already spent $1.6 million on them and now his loyalists are removing internal staffing safeguards that could raise objections. Even without the termination of over fifty employees, a proposed resolution to forbid the RNC from paying his legal expenses failed and one RNC committee member believes a majority of RNC members would actually support paying for them.
Let’s round up that AdImpact number to $3 billion for easy math. Trump’s legal fees would be one sixth-almost 20%-of all presidential campaign expenses! That is a staggering amount of money to go to waste over a single non-campaign expense!
The question then becomes which states to cut from the national campaign budget entirely. Despite his desire to win New York and its electoral votes, that simply wouldn’t be plausible. Trump’s path back to the White House would look similar to one of two ways:
Presidential spending also impacts down-ballot turnout, especially in this age of declining split-ticket votes. Trump would almost be forced to invest in Florida, Ohio, Montana, and Texas to prop up their Senate candidates as well as shore up GOP turnout lest he risk three states’ electoral votes flipping to the Democrats (Ohio the longest shot, Montana has no chance). I believe North Carolina is the red state most likely to flip blue, so there is another investment, despite it lacking a Senate race.
This doesn’t take the House into account, which the GOP is widely expected to lose; the only question is to what degree. At this point, I believe they would be lucky to suffer defeat in only 25 seats, but I haven’t done the mapping to back that up. Redistricting has substantially altered the landscape from even 2022 and many frontline GOP House members like Derrick Van Orden have proved to be more akin to disheveled bullies than respectable members of a major political party. Average voters may not notice everything, but on the whole, the electorate tends to have a decent judge of character once the partisan blinders are taken off.
At the very least, Trump’s control over the RNC will lead to a chilling of criticism by congressional and senatorial candidates who may want to try and get some daylight between themselves and the top of the ticket. I would not put it past the RNC to cut money from campaigns that step out of line. At its greatest extent, Trump’s loyalists could divert bottomless amounts of cash to legal fees and only the presidential campaign-which would still be an uphill climb.
While we have to take Trump’s campaign very seriously and ensure its defeat, I think we are more likely to see a major Biden victory and retention of the Senate than Republican unified control. Our future is in our hands. You are the calvary and the hope you’ve been waiting for.