By any fair measure, Arizona was a Republican stronghold for decades. In the half-century between 2018 and 1968, Arizonans only elected one Democratic U.S. senator, and between 1976 and 2016, there were 11 presidential elections, with the GOP ticket carrying the Grand Canyon State in 10 of them.
Those days have clearly passed. Both of Arizona’s U.S. senators are now part of the Democratic conference; the state now has a Democratic governor; and in 2020, President Joe Biden narrowly won Arizona’s 11 electoral votes.
With this in mind, The Messenger reported this week that the Arizona Republican Party “picked a bad time to run out of money.”
There are two competitive House seats on the line as Republicans are looking to defend their slim majority in the lower chamber next year. Not to mention, Arizona is going to be a major swing state in the 2024 presidential election. But the state GOP has just over $23,000 in cash on hand in its federal account, according to federal filings, and roughly $144,000 according to their Q2 state filing.
“When you look at the money, certainly the Republicans are struggling,” Arizona pollster Paul Bentz told the outlet.
It’s tempting to think there’s a logical explanation for such a shortfall: The Arizona GOP was heavily invested in last year’s election cycle, which featured several competitive statewide contests, so perhaps it stands to reason that the party is short on cash during the off-year.
The problem with this explanation is that it falls apart rather quickly. For one thing, two years ago at this time — the year after a bruising 2020 cycle — the Arizona Republican Party had over $1 million in the bank. For another, if this explanation were true, we’d expect to see Democratic and GOP state parties everywhere with very little left in the bank.
But that’s not the case at all. As The Messenger’s report added, the Arizona’s GOP’s financial status “pales in comparison to state parties in places like Wisconsin and Ohio, where both had more than $1 million in cash on hand at the end of the most recent quarter.”
If it makes Arizona Republicans feel any better, it’s not completely alone. The Detroit News reported two weeks ago, for example, that the Michigan GOP’s latest filing showed it had about $93,000 in its bank accounts — a total party insiders characterized as “alarming.”
Around the same time, The Daily Beast reported that the Minnesota GOP’s latest Federal Election Commission filing said it had less than $54 cash on hand. What’s more, in May, The Colorado Sun reported that the GOP in the Rocky Mountain State was facing a financial crunch so serious that it “didn’t pay any employees.” The deputy chief of staff for the Colorado House GOP soon after characterized the state party as “bankrupt” and unable to afford rent payment on the party’s offices. The Republican Party at the national level is facing some serious challenges. In multiple states, the challenges appear even worse. Update: National Review’s Jim Geraghty apparently covered similar ground in a report yesterday, asking, “Hey, it’s not like Republicans wanted to compete in Arizona, Colorado, Michigan, and Minnesota in 2024, right?”
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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