The Democratic National Committee is so short on cash that it put up its own building.
Public records show the DNC used its Washington headquarters as collateral for a $15 million line of credit — the largest off-year loan the committee has ever taken out, according to NOTUS, which first reported it. Fox News Digital reported Monday that the loan terms allow the committee to draw down another $5 million on top of what it has already taken.
The DNC’s answer is that none of this is unusual. “This is not new,” a DNC official told Fox News Digital. “The loan documents were publicly released in November, and the DNC’s building was also used as collateral in our prior lines of credit in 2019, 2018, 2014 and many other years.”
Borrowing before a big election is ordinary. The balance sheet the loan is sitting on is not. As of June 30, the DNC carried $18.5 million in debt against just $16.3 million in cash on hand — more than $2 million underwater. At the same stage of the last midterm cycle, the committee closed 2022 with $30.5 million in the bank and roughly $420,000 in debt. The Republican National Committee, as of June 30, had $128.5 million in cash and no debt at all.
That gap is already dictating what Democrats can and cannot do. The DNC will not be making its traditional transfers to the House and Senate campaign committees this cycle. Republicans have out-raised Democrats consistently across 2025 and into 2026, and the National Republican Senatorial Committee has outpaced its Democratic counterpart as well.
Chairman Ken Martin is telling a different story. In a July 20 Substack post, he wrote that “the current DNC has raised the most money of any DNC without the White House in the 198-year history of the Democratic Party,” citing total receipts of more than $207 million through June 2026 against $109 million in the comparable 18-month stretch of the last Trump-era cycle.
His own members are not buying it. “Ken gaslighting us about the DNC’s finances and not being transparent about the financial situation makes us doubt if he can oversee the DNC during the most important primary of our lifetime,” one DNC member told NOTUS. A source familiar with the committee’s fundraising put it more bluntly to the Washington Post in April: “They just have no money, and no clear path to either pay off their debt incurred by Ken.”
The internal picture Fox describes is not a party quietly managing a cash-flow dip. Axios, citing two sources familiar, reported that the DNC asked its leadership team to sign nondisclosure agreements ahead of a meeting about the party’s finances. The leaks continued anyway. The New York Times reported that Martin threw his phone at an aide’s desk, and quoted the warning he delivered to staffers in May: “It pisses me off when I see leaks out of this building. No more of that s–t. No more.”
The Times also reported that the committee asked vendors to hold their invoices until after Election Day — a practice the DNC defends as standard. And even while strapped, leadership has spent nearly $1 million on party operations in U.S. territories whose residents will have no bearing whatsoever on which party controls Congress in January.
Not every Democratic number is grim. Individual candidates in marquee Senate races in Georgia and Ohio have raised significantly more than their Republican opponents, and the DCCC pledged all of its assets against a $20 million line of credit in 2024 without the sky falling.
But candidate fundraising does not fund a national field program, and a party committee that is $2 million underwater going into a midterm has no cushion when a race breaks open in October. The DNC raised a record sum and still ended up mortgaging the roof over its head. That is not a fundraising story. That is a spending story.
Source: foxnews.com
