LET'S REVISIT THAT DISCUSSION OF DEMOCRATS' "EMOTIONAL GIVING"

Back in January, in an interview with Vox's Sean Illing, James Carville griped:

Just look at how Democrats organize and spend money. For Christ’s sake, [South Carolina Democrat] Jaime Harrison raised over $100 million only to lose his Senate race to Lindsey Graham by 10 points. Amy McGrath runs for Senate in Kentucky and raises over $90 million only to get crushed by Mitch McConnell.

They were always going to lose those races, but Democrats keep doing this stupid shit. They’re too damn emotional. Democrats obsess over high-profile races they can’t win because that’s where all the attention is. We’re addicted to hopeless causes.

A few months later, Jonathan Weismann of The New York Times delivered the same message, in a news article titled "Democratic Dollars Flow Once Again to Likely Lost Causes":

Every election year in recent cycles, celebrity Democratic candidates have emerged — either on the strength of their personalities, the notoriety of their Republican opponents or both — to rake in campaign cash, then lose impossible elections. Some Democrats say such races are draining money from more winnable campaigns....

Oh, those silly Democratics They squander so much donor cash on hopeless causes! And this is clearly a problem that's unique to only one of our two major parties!

Keep that conventional wisdom in mind as you consider this:

One email warned of a "left wing mob," seeking to undermine the results of the presidential contest. Another said then-President Donald Trump needed campaign contributions to "fight back." And in another instance, his supporters were urged to "step up to protect the integrity of the election."

Those examples of Trump's relentless post-election fundraising flashed on a screen Monday during the public hearing of the House committee investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol. The panel sought to demonstrate in its second public hearing that the former President had ample proof from many people in his inner circle that his claims of election fraud were baseless, but he still peddled them in the race to collect massive campaign sums in the waning days of his presidency.

The roughly $250 million that poured in after the election largely went to the former President's political action committee, rather than to the "election integrity" effort touted to his donors, the committee said.

"The big lie was also a big rip-off," said California Rep. Zoe Lofgren, one of the Democrats on the panel. After the hearing, Lofgren told CNN that the committee also has found evidence Trump and members of his family have personally benefited from donations that were advertised as going toward election fraud claims.

"Not only was there the Big Lie, there was the big rip-off."

Trump knew his claims of election fraud were false and duped donors into contributing millions of dollars to an election fund that never existed, Rep. Zoe Lofgren says https://t.co/PNnpBym9wr pic.twitter.com/KPkl1Gpe28

— Bloomberg Quicktake (@Quicktake) June 13, 2022

No, Democrats don't have a monopoly on "emotional giving."

And while you can argue that ordinary Republican donors gave to Trump after the election because they naivel believed he had a legitimate chance of overturning the election, these are also people who believe that Trump is staggeringly rich, so why did they imagine he needed the money at all?

This was emotional giving as much as any donation to any longshot Democrat. Neither party has a monopoly on this.