A guy shows the Dude a fundraising number, and it turns out you can spend ninety million dollars and still not get the rug back.
So I’m at the lanes, working on a White Russian that Donny swears is made with real half and half and not whatever he found behind the shoe rental counter, and I’m just scrolling, the way a man does, and a number stops me cold, man, mid-sip.
Ninety million dollars. That’s what it says. Amy McGrath, a few years back, spent ninety million dollars trying to beat Mitch McConnell in Kentucky. Lost by twenty points. Twenty. That’s not a close one, man. That’s not even a bowling score. That’s a shutout with the bumpers up.
I said, huh.
Then Maude walks in, because Maude always walks in right when a number needs saying correctly, and she tells me the actual record that cycle was Jaime Harrison in South Carolina, a hundred and nine million dollars against Lindsey Graham, and he still lost by ten. Ninety percent of that money, she says, came from outside South Carolina. People in Ohio and California mailing checks to a Senate race they cannot vote in, to a state some of them will never once visit, because they wanted, very badly, to watch one specific man lose.
Graham himself, when they asked him about it, just said the money is because they hate my guts. Which, credit where it’s due, is more self-aware than most of what comes out of a press shop.
This is when Walter stands up. He does not need to stand up, we are sitting at a table, but Walter stands up.
“This is not correlation, Dude. This is a fucking pattern. This is Vietnam.”
“It’s not Vietnam, Walter.”
“I’m not talking about the war, I’m talking about the doctrine, I’m talking about how you keep escalating a losing position because pulling out feels like admitting the position was fucked from the jump, and nobody wants to be the guy who says it was fucked from the jump, so instead you send another ninety million dollars into Kentucky. Are you following me? Am I wrong?”
Donny, who has been quiet, mostly because Donny is always quiet until precisely the wrong moment, goes, “So the money didn’t do anything?”
“Donny, you’re out of your fucking element. The money did plenty. It bought television. It bought yard signs nobody in Kentucky asked for. It bought political consultant’s beach houses. What it did not buy is two million people who wanted to vote for Amy McGrath, because those people were never there to begin with, and no amount of half and half of uncertain provenance changes what’s actually in the carton.”
That last part was mine. I liked that one.
Here’s the thing, though, and this is where it stops being about ninety million dollars and starts being about the rug. Because the rug tied the room together. And when the rug got peed on, that was that, man. No amount of money brought the rug back. You could go buy a new rug. It would not be the rug. The room would still not be tied together, not really, and everybody standing in it would still be able to tell.
That’s what the McConnell money is. That’s what the Graham money is. It’s not a strategy, it’s grief with a donate button bolted on. Somebody hurt you, over years, and there is nothing you can personally do about the guy who hurt you, so you send nine dollars to whoever is running against him in a state you’ve never set foot in, and for about four seconds the room feels tied together again. Then Election Day happens, the room is still not tied together, and now there is also nine dollars less in the world, and Kentucky is still, somehow, Kentucky.
Beto’s the interesting case, actually, because Maude looked this one up too. First time, 2018, against Cruz, eighty million dollars, lost by two and a half points. That one almost worked, man. That one was close enough that you can’t even call it grief money, that was a real campaign that happened to lose. Then he ran it back in 2022 for governor, against Abbott, raised almost as much all over again, and lost by eleven. Same donors. Same energy. Same guy telling everybody he was born to be in it. Except the second time it wasn’t a campaign anymore, it was a subscription.
Walter’s already onto the next one before I can finish the thought.
“You know who’s got a live one right now? Sununu. New Hampshire. They weren’t even supposed to be spending real money there, they were out chasing Texas, chasing Kansas for fuck’s sake, playing with house money in states that were never realistically in play, and meanwhile the seat that was supposed to be free and clear is sitting at a two point race. That’s not a strategy, Dude. That’s a guy buying an extremely expensive round for the wrong end of the bar while somebody walks off with his stool.”
I don’t know what it says about anything, man. I’m not going to sit here and tell you what it says about the country, or the donor class, or whatever it was that number was supposed to make me feel. I just know close to two hundred million dollars went into two states in one year and neither state changed its mind, and somewhere in Kentucky there’s a guy who was never once going to vote for Amy McGrath, sitting on a couch that ninety million dollars did not buy him, watching a commercial that ninety million dollars did buy, wondering who exactly these people think they’re talking to.
The rug’s not walking back through that door, man. That was never what the money was for.
The Dude abides.