RNC Pulls Financial Support From Roy Moore

The Republican National Committee (RNC) has pulled its financial support from GOP Senate hopeful Roy Moore by severing official fundraising ties, leaving Moore "increasingly isolated as he confronts charges of sexual misconduct with teenagers." According to Politico, the RNC is terminating a joint fundraising agreement it had with Moore and is also canceling a field program it had set up ahead of the state’s Dec. 12 special election. The committee had about a dozen paid canvassers in Alabama working for Moore. It will no longer transfer any money to the race.

New documents filed Tuesday with the Federal Election Commission show the RNC is no longer listed alongside other groups involved in the joint fundraiser. The two parties now listed on the documents include “Judge Roy Moore for US Senate” and the Alabama Republican Party. According to The Hill, the initial FEC filing, dated Oct. 24, included both the RNC and National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) . The new filing does not include either of those groups.

Practically, this means that whereas a donor could have given up to $521,200 per year to the joint fundraising committee when it included both the RNC and NRSC. Now that they have pulled out, a donor can only give a max of $12,700 per year to the committee.

The severing of financial ties comes as the GOP intensifies its effort to pressure Moore out of the race. On Monday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell called on the candidate to “step aside.” McConnell, whose view was also echoed by Paul Ryan on Tusday, also said he believed the accounts of Moore’s female accusers, who told the Washington Post that Moore pursued them when they were teenagers and he was in his 30s.

Moore, a former state Supreme Court justice, has denied the allegations and has vowed to remain in the race. "We’ve said this before and we’ll say it again: Judge Moore is an innocent man and has never had any sexual misconduct with anyone,” his campaign said on Monday.

“The person who should step aside is @SenateMajLdr Mitch McConnell,” Moore tweeted on Monday. “He has failed conservatives and must be replaced. #DrainTheSwamp.”

Meanwhile, Even if Moore were to exit, his name would still appear on the ballot because state law prevents a candidate from withdrawing from a race within 76 days before an election.

One possibility being discussed is waging a write-in campaign. But with just over four weeks until the election, such an effort would be a long-shot. Strange, who Moore defeated in a September runoff, has expressed little interest in being a write-in candidate, according to three people with direct knowledge of his thinking.

Broke And Bleeding Cash, DNC Ends June $3.3 Million In Debt

After spending a truly obscene amount of money on the Georgia special election last month, money that was proven to be completely wasted after Jon Ossoff was destroyed by Karen Handel, the DNC"s balance sheet is looking a little deflated.  Of course, spending $22 million dollars for a seat where candidates usually spend about $1 million each tends to take a toll on your political war chest.

Unfortunately, even $176 per vote, or roughly 7.6x more than what Karen Handel spent, wasn"t enough to buy a Georgia House seat.  Oops.

And while we"re sure that the new DNC Chair would love to forget all about that Georgia race, as the Federal Election Commission"s June financial reports reveal, his deflated balance sheet, which included only $7.5mm of cash and $3.3mm of debt, serves as a constant reminder of the wasted money that he"d undoubtedly love to get back.

As The Observer reported last month, this is hardly a new phenomenon for the DNC as May 2017 was the worst fundraising month since the Iraq War in 2003.

DNC Chair Tom Perez recently sent out a fundraising email to supporters claiming, “I know garbage when I see it,” citing that he once worked on a dump truck. It’s ironic that he referred to the GOP health care bill as a “flaming dumpster fire” because he has been presiding over the disaster that is the Democratic National Committee. The organization reported that May 2017 was its worst fundraising month since the Iraq War in 2003, and April 2017 was its worst fundraising month since 2009. In May, the DNC also reported that it has $1.9 million in debt. Despite the fact that former Secretary of Labor Tom Perez was recruited by Barack Obama to appease the party’s donors, lobbyists and PACs, even they have refused to prop up the failing brand.

Not approving of the strategies laid out at a retreat for donors in January 2017, billionaires Mark Pincus and Reid Hoffman started their own political organization, Win the Future. As donors are increasingly tired of seeing their investments go to waste, many have started their own funds or used their access to take over leadership positions themselves—such as Florida billionaire donor Stephen Bittel did to become the Florida Democratic Party chair earlier this year. Democratic billionaire J.B. Pritzker is running for governor of Illinois, and billionaire Tom Steyer is debating running for governor of California. Haim Saban and James Simons poured millions into Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, but they have yet to be listed by the FEC as DNC donors in 2017. Additionally, George Soros has only given $33,900 to the DNC in 2017, but he poured millions of dollars into the Democratic Party in 2016.

By contrast, as The Hill notes, June was a record breaking fundraising month for the RNC bringing their YTD haul to over $75 million, or roughly double what the DNC has managed to raise so far in 2017.

The Republican National Committee (RNC) raised a record $13.4 million in June, bringing its total 2017 fundraising to $75.3 million.

In a release provided first to The Hill, the RNC announced another strong monthly haul and has $44.7 million in the bank. It’s the most the RNC has raised in June of a nonpresidential year.

RNC Chairwoman Ronna Romney McDaniel credited the record fundraising to the committee’s “loyal network of grassroots donors” due to their support for President Trump and the GOP’s agenda.

“Because of the generous contributions, the RNC will continue to promote conservative values while bolstering our efforts to support, defend, and elect more Republicans,” McDaniel said in a statement.

So what makes up the DNC"s $3.3 million debt balance?  Well, it consists of a $1 million bank loan and roughly $2 million of overdue bills primarily due to telemarketers. 

Ironically, of all the vendors that the DNC apparently can"t afford to pay on a timely basis, one of the few that actually has a zero balance is their paper shredding company...

Records Of 198 Million US Voters "Accidentally" Exposed By RNC Contractor

While the Republican National Committee was allegedly busy evading Russian hacking attempts during the campaign, one of the contractors tasked with running its big-data operation apparently stored some of its most-sensitive files on an unsecured Amazon server that could be accessed by anyone who stumbled across the URL. As the Hill reports, Deep Root Analytics left a database containing 24 terabytes of data, including information about 198 million potential voters, or virtually the entire eligible population. The data included sensitive, but publicly available, information like voters’ addresses and phone numbers.

But more interesting than any personal information involved in the leak was the insight into Deep Root’s "big data" modeling tactics. The data included probabilities for individual voters’ positions on dozens of political issues, as well as estimates of how they voted in past elections. It also provided some insight into how big-data firms collaborate, as identifiers in the data suggest some of it was provided to Deep Root from TargetPoint and the Data Trust, two other big-data firms used by the Republicans.

Here’s the Hill:

“For example, a 50-gigabyte file of "Post Elect 2016" information, last updated in mid-January, contained modeled data about a voter"s likely positions on 46 different issues ranging from "how likely it is the individual voted for Obama in 2012, whether they agree with the Trump foreign policy of "America First" and how likely they are to be concerned with auto manufacturing as an issue, among others."

That file appears in a folder titled "targetpoint," an apparent reference to another firm contracted by the RNC to crunch data. UpGuard speculates that the folder may imply that the firm TargetPoint compiled and shared the data with Deep Root. Another folder appears to reference Data Trust, another contracted firm.”

One UpGuard analyst who spoke with the Hill said he looked himself up in the data and that the estimated preferences were right on the money.

Gizmodo went into more detail about the exact nature of some of Deep Root’s models, including one that was used to predict voters’ opinions about the oil and gas industry in the US.

“One exposed folder is labeled “Exxon-Mobile” [sic] and contains spreadsheets apparently used to predict which voters support the oil and gas industry. Divided by state, the files include the voters’ names and addresses, along with a unique RNC identification number assigned to every US citizen registered to vote. Each row indicates where voters likely fall on issues of interest to ExxonMobil, the country’s biggest natural gas producer.”

“The data evaluates, for example, whether or not a specific voter believes drilling for fossil fuels is vital to US security. It also predicts if the voter thinks the US should be moving away from fossil-fuel use. The ExxonMobil ‘national score’ document alone contains data on 182,746,897 Americans spread across 19 fields.”

Some of the data were apparently scraped from various subreddits, including, bizarrely, the banned subreddit “r/fatpeoplehate.” As Gizmodo noted, this is likely an attempt by Republicans to match social-media profiles with individual voters, a technique at Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign pioneered.

“Some of the data included in Deep Root’s dataset veers into downright bizarre territory. A folder titled simply ‘reddit’ houses 170 GBs of data apparently scraped from several subreddits, including the controversial r/fatpeoplehate that was home to a community of people who posted pictures of people and mocked them for their weight before it was banned from Reddit’s platform in 2015. Other subreddits that appear to have been scraped by Deep Root or a partner organization focused on more benign topics, like mountain biking and the Spanish language.”

“The Reddit data could’ve been used as training data for an artificial intelligence algorithm focused on natural language processing, or it might have been harvested as part of an effort to match up Reddit users with their voter registration records. During the 2012 election cycle, Barack Obama’s campaign data team relied on information gleaned from Facebook profiles and matched profiles to voter records.”

Reddit was an important locus of activity for Trump supporters during the campaign: it was the medium where they would create memes and share news stories that countered the mainstream media narrative. The subreddit currently boasts more than 440,000 members. Deep Root was paid handsomely for its efforts. The Hill, citing FEC data, said the firm collected $983,000 from the RNC between January 2015 and November 2016, according to Ad Age.

Though Deep Root has characterized the leak as an oversight, it still amounts to the largest leak of voter information ever.

“It dwarfs the second-largest exposure of voter information — 93.4 million records of Mexican citizens — by more than 100 million voters and tops the largest data breach of voter information — 55 million records of Philippine voters — by more than 140 million."

For its part, Deep Root said it was merely using the data to help target TV ad-buys. “Deep Root Analytics builds voter models to help enhance advertiser understanding of TV viewership. The data accessed was not built for or used by any specific client. It is our proprietary analysis to help inform local television ad buying."