North Dakota Republican Director: Despite Decline In Party Fundraising, Party Will Be Ready For 2014

I had North Dakota Republican Party Executive Director Jason Flores on the radio this morning talking about 2014 races. Not surprisingly, he’s predicting a strong season for Republican candidates, but I asked him about the decline in party fundraising to date in the 2014 cycle as compared to 2012.

As I’ve written about previously, Republicans are about $31,000 behind where they were at this point in the 2012 cycle while Democrats are up more than $132,000. So far, there’s a big gap between Democrat and Republican party-level fundraising so far in the 2014 cycle.

Flores said the NDGOP’s decline in fundraising is due to this being an “down year” election with no presidential race, no Senate race and no gubernatorial race. He also pointed out – and this is a fair point I’ve made myself – that Republicans have a lot of incumbent candidates who are always fundraising and dilute the pool for state party fundraising, whereas Democrats have few incumbent candidates and do most of their fundraising through the party.