Democrats keep telling themselves a blue wave is coming for President Trump in November.
But the people who write the party’s biggest checks don’t seem to believe a word of it.
And two of Barack Obama’s former aides just let slip one ugly money secret their party wanted kept under wraps.
What Pfeiffer and Vietor admitted on stage in Texas
The hosts of the Pod Save America podcast took the stage at the Texas Tribune Festival on September 25, according to Fox News.
Dan Pfeiffer and Tommy Vietor both worked for Barack Obama. Both spent the session talking up the idea that Texas could turn blue and that Republicans are struggling even in rural areas.
Then Pfeiffer conceded the part Democrats don’t like saying out loud. His party has far less money to work with than the GOP.
Vietor picked up the thread and told the crowd that operatives and candidates are “voicing concern and frustration” that the party’s traditional big donors aren’t treating this election as a generational opportunity.
“And it just feels like a moment when all the biggest donors in the party should be pushing all their chips in the table as aggressively as possible,” Vietor said.
He couldn’t come up with a reason for the holdout. Pfeiffer could.
“Part of it is people still angry about how that election went and feeling like they lit a billion dollars on fire in that election, which is a fair quibble in some ways,” Pfeiffer said.
A fair quibble. That’s one way to describe the Kamala Harris campaign.
The Trump excuse and the $1.5 billion hangover
Pfeiffer had a second explanation ready, and it’s the one Democrats would much rather talk about.
“There are a lot of people who are very afraid of being targeted by Trump like that just that your business is going to be targeted,” Pfeiffer said. He went on to describe donors picturing the FBI at their door and regulators combing through their books.
But in the remarks Fox News reported, Pfeiffer didn’t name a single donor that happened to. It’s speculation, and it conveniently shifts the blame away from the people who spent the money.
Republican consultant Mary Marslender gave Fox News Digital the less flattering version. Harris’ campaign, she said, “spent a staggering $1.5 billion in just 15 weeks” and lost the popular vote, the Electoral College, and the Senate anyway.
“Major donors who contributed eight-figure sums in 2024 have noticed this poor return on investment and appear less willing to spend this cycle,” Marslender said.
The bills from that campaign kept coming long after the concession speech. Axios reported that the Democratic National Committee paid more than $15 million toward Harris campaign expenses in the first six months of 2025.
And the party’s books still haven’t recovered. The Deseret News reported that the DNC entered the midterm stretch with $16.3 million in cash and $18.5 million in debt, leaving the committee roughly $2 million in the hole.
The Republican National Committee reported $128.5 million and zero debt over the same period. The Washington Examiner later reported the RNC finished July with $130.3 million on hand, the highest amount in committee history.
An RNC official told the Examiner that Vice President JD Vance, the committee’s finance chairman, is leading that fundraising operation.
Why the checkbooks tell a different story than the polls
Pfeiffer told the Texas crowd this election could be “one of the largest swings in American history.” He compared it to 2006, and then went bigger and floated 1994.
But people who give eight-figure sums don’t get rich by ignoring their own instincts. If they truly believed a realignment was sitting on the table, a little anger over 2024 wouldn’t keep their wallets shut.
Even a Democrat consultant isn’t buying the hype. Julian Epstein told Fox News Digital the “so-called ‘blue tsunami’ is very likely overstated” and argued that pollsters have consistently undersampled Republicans in recent years.
“Donors are holding back because the Democrats don’t have any attractive, positive agenda,” Epstein said.
He went further and described today’s Democrat Party as being about “tax-and-spend redistributionist big government welfare.”
Marslender pointed at the same problem from the other side of the aisle. She said many major donors slowed or withheld contributions over the party’s “shift toward socialist policies.”
“Unsurprisingly, calls to destroy the country’s financial institutions have not resonated well with wealthy Democratic supporters,” Marslender added.
And that’s the piece the podcast hosts skipped. The party’s energy now sits with its socialist wing, a movement whose stated goals include government ownership of major industries. Asking a hedge fund manager to bankroll that is asking him to finance his own funeral.
Socialism has a long record wherever governments tried it. Economies shrink, the middle class gets squeezed, and the people with capital leave. Wealthy Democrat donors can read a history book as well as anyone.
There’s a side observation worth making here. For years Democrats railed against big money in politics. Now two of the party’s most prominent voices are on a stage in Texas pleading for billionaires to open their checkbooks.
But the money gap doesn’t settle anything by itself. Individual Democrat candidates have raised plenty in key races, as the Deseret News noted, and Harris proved in 2024 that a mountain of cash can’t rescue a message voters reject.
Still, Trump comes out of this with something Democrats can’t buy back before November. His opponents’ own strategists admitted on stage that their financial base has lost faith.
And they admitted why, even if they tried to pin half of it on him. The donors watched $1.5 billion vanish in 15 weeks, watched the party drift further Left afterward, and decided to sit on their hands.
Pfeiffer and Vietor wanted to shame those donors back to the table. They may have just reminded them why they left.
Sources:
Fox News, “Former Obama aides claim Democratic donors are still holding back after being burned by 2024 loss,” September 28, 2026
Deseret News, “What does a broke Democratic Party mean for the midterms?” July 28, 2026
Washington Examiner, “RNC raised $19 million in July and has $130 million for midterm elections”
Axios, “Millions in Harris campaign expenses still weigh on the DNC,” August 25, 2025
