Congress

Trump keeps driving online fundraising — for both parties

Published

5 months ago

February 11, 2026

Donald Trump still raises far more money online than any other GOP figure.

Democrats get major fundraising boosts when they clash with him.

And the Democratic money machine continues to churn — a sign of hope for a party seeking to regroup from brutal losses the year prior.

Those are among the key patterns that appeared in a Blue Light News analysis of online fundraising across 2025, as both parties began to gear up for highly competitive midterms.

The sweeping Blue Light News analysis of data from ActBlue and WinRed — the primary fundraising platforms for each party — revealed how Trump, who is constitutionally barred from seeking reelection, is still at the center of the GOP’s digital and financial universe. And while Democrats continue to debate how much they should focus on opposing Trump in their broader campaign messaging, the data shows just how strongly the GOP president motivates liberal donors.

Major surges in online Democratic fundraising were fueled by members of the party standing up to — or being attacked by — the president. Democratic candidates’ biggest fundraising days on ActBlue were all driven by conflict with Trump, with those days accounting for millions of dollars raised from tens of thousands of donors giving online for the first time this cycle.

Among Republicans, Trump’s own joint fundraising committee, Trump National Committee, continued to raise the most money out of anyone on WinRed in 2025, bringing more over the course of the year than the next two biggest GOP groups combined. Trump’s political operation accounted for more than 1 in 5 total dollars raised federally through WinRed last year.

ActBlue and WinRed report all donations made to federal campaigns and committees through their platforms, providing a detailed picture of small-dollar giving. The platforms are so dominant that they include the vast majority, though not all, of online donations for both parties.

The data provides insight not only into who raised the most but the specific moments that drove donors to give.

Leading the way was Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), who saw a massive surge in donations when he broke records with a 25-hour quasi-filibuster speech protesting the Trump administration’s policies.

Booker’s campaign committee received nearly 92,000 donations totaling $2.5 million on ActBlue on April 2, the day after his speech finished. It was the highest single-day total for any federal committee on the platform in 2025. For roughly a third of those donors, it was their first donation of the year on ActBlue.

The New Jersey senator was not the only Democrat to get a donation boost off of standing up to Trump. California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s joint fundraising committee saw a massive surge in donations in early June after he sued the Trump administration to block the deployment of the National Guard to Los Angeles and Trump suggested arresting the governor. The group, Campaign for Democracy, recorded more than 47,000 donations on June 11, for a total of $1.3 million.

That was the start of a three-day surge that accounted for nearly one-third of all online donations to the Newsom joint fundraising committee in 2025.

Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) saw nearly 43,000 donations for a total of nearly $1.3 million to his campaign committee Nov. 25 after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the Pentagon to investigate whether a video that featured Kelly and others advising troops not to follow illegal orders was itself unlawful. Roughly 1 in 5 donations on the platform that day went to Kelly’s campaign.

Kelly then remained the top fundraiser nearly every day for three weeks after that, bringing in donations from about 278,000 unique donors in November and December. That surge set Kelly apart from other Democratic figures last year for both its intensity and duration. The Blue Light News analysis found that more than three-quarters of donors in that time period had not given to Kelly previously in the year. For 1 in 5 of his donors, it was the first time they’d given to any Democrat through ActBlue in the entire year.

Kelly’s strong preexisting brand helped him leverage the attack from Trump into a fundraising bonanza, said Mike Nellis, a democratic digital strategist and founder of the firm Authentic.

“You can raise a ton of money by just opposing Trump,” Nellis said. “But if you want to elevate yourself into that stratosphere of becoming a household name that people believe in, with Democratic donors who are going to give you $5, $10, $25, over and over and over, you’ve got to go a little bit deeper.”

Democrats’ dream of flipping the Senate also fueled massive contributions. A handful of Senate candidates — Roy Cooper in North Carolina, Sherrod Brown in Ohio, Janet Mills in Maine and both James Talarico and Jasmine Crockett in Texas — were the top Democratic online fundraisers when they launched their respective campaigns.

Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.), the only incumbent Democratic senator seeking reelection in a state Trump won in 2024, brought in $32.5 million through ActBlue in 2025, more than any other candidate on the platform. Democrats running in competitive Senate races this year were consistently among the top overall fundraisers on ActBlue, as was the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee itself.

The online fundraising landscape for Democrats looking to take back the House was more muddled, with the top fundraising numbers coming more often from progressive stars than candidates in competitive races.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), long a fundraising powerhouse, raised $22.8 million on ActBlue in 2025, the most of any House Democrat, followed by House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who raised just shy of $11 million through his campaign and joint fundraising committee, then Rep. Eugene Vindman (D-Va.) and Eileen Laubacher, one of the Democrats seeking to challenge Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) in a heavily Republican district.

Those House candidates reflect a few of the different ways that virality can help online fundraising. More than 400,000 donors gave to Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign more than once in 2025, reflecting her strength with returning donors. Laubacher’s numbers reflect how running in a district represented by a high-profile Republican can attract Democratic donors — even as she still has to get through a primary to face Boebert.

But vulnerable Democratic House incumbents and candidates running in some of the most competitive battlegrounds were not represented among those with the best online fundraising numbers — a challenge for party strategists as they fight for the resources to flip the House.

“The things that work to raise money from small donors are the opposite of the things that work to beat MAGA,” said Liam Kerr, co-founder of the centrist Democratic group WelcomePAC.

At the same time, Kerr said that there was enough variety in the candidates who put up strong online fundraising numbers to suggest that more moderate candidates can make inroads.

Donors give, Kerr said, because they want to “feel like they’re part of something.” If candidates in key races can start to capture the attention of donors across the country, then, he said, “the base of the raged donor class would start to shift to what they thought could beat Trump.”

Methodology: Donations and monetary totals are based on ActBlue and WinRed receipts, not reports from campaigns. Donations that were later refunded are still included in the totals.

Congress

Leon Black tells House Oversight he had no knowledge of Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes

Published

14 minutes ago

June 26, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Leon Black told the House Oversight Committee on Friday that he had no knowledge of Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes during the years he paid the convicted sex offender tens of millions of dollars, according to a copy of the billionaire investor’s prepared remarks.

“I don’t understand why people — including members of this committee — would accept baseless speculation about me without regard to the facts and spin such ugly and vicious narratives that are demonstrably false,” Black said in his opening statement, obtained by Blue Light News.

Lawmakers, however, filed into Black’s scheduled transcribed interview Friday morning already suspicious of their witness. House Oversight Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) told reporters he believed Black’s testimony had “the potential to be the most groundbreaking” of anything the panel has heard so far in its long-running Epstein investigation.

Comer also said the committee had reason to believe that Black had signed nondisclosure agreements with some of Epstein’s victims.

Black, a co-founder of Apollo Global Management, did acknowledge in his prepared remarks that he was aware of Epstein’s 2008 sex crime conviction at the time of their association but that “Epstein told me that it was an isolated incident resulting from a fake ID.”

“Five years after his conviction, I gave Epstein a second chance, as did many others,” he continued. “I wish I had not.”

Black also told lawmakers that he knew Epstein for 18 years before he began paying him in 2013 for tax and estate planning. At that time, Black said, he saw Epstein surrounded by some of the world’s most powerful people — among them former President Bill Clinton, tech mogul and philanthropist Bill Gates and then-White House counsel Kathy Ruemmler.

And he appeared to suggest that he saw Epstein as legitimate, in part, because of those who chose to associate with him: “Epstein appeared to me and to many others to have redeemed himself: [H]e served on several prestigious boards, hobnobbed with leading people in academia, the arts, business executives, and numerous world leaders.”

Clinton and Gates have already spoken with Oversight investors about their ties to Epstein; Ruemmler has agreed to sit for an interview with the panel in July.

Black said he ultimately fired Epstein in 2018 “after growing tired of his relentless pursuit of more and more money from me for professional services, his mistruths and misrepresentations … and his failure to repay most of a $30 million demand loan that I had made to him.”

He also acknowledged the allegations of sexual misconduct that have been levied against him in litigation, which he called “demonstrably baseless” and “entirely fabricated.”

In one recent case, the judge found that the law firm that had been representing Black’s accusers and the plaintiff in the case were “engaged in serious, sanctionable misconduct in this case.” However, the lawsuit — brought by a woman who claimed to have been raped by Black when she was 16 — was allowed to proceed.

“There are numerous allegations of real abuse by women — by survivors — against Mr. Black,” Rep. Robert Garcia of California, the top Democrat on the Oversight panel, told reporters Friday morning.

Congress

Capitol agenda: House GOP agenda gets tenuous Trump lifeline

Published

3 hours ago

June 26, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

President Donald Trump handed Speaker Mike Johnson a lifeline Thursday to get Republicans’ agenda back on track next week.

But hard-liners’ festering discontent over Trump’s stalled election bill could jam the chamber again.

For now, members plan to return Monday and press forward on a long list of major legislation before Independence Day recess, including fiscal 2027 funding bills, the annual defense policy bill, a kids online safety bill and negotiations for a third reconciliation measure lawmakers want to stuff with party priorities.

Trump Thursday instructed the band of GOP hard-liners to lift their procedural block of House floor business. Still, some are doubling down in new ways.

Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, who engineered this week’s impasse through a blockade of procedural votes, said if leaders want her support to advance legislation next week, they’ll need to attach the SAVE America Act to the defense policy bill.

Senior House Republicans feel joining the bills would kill the must-pass defense legislation that typically wins bipartisan support. And Majority Leader John Thune said Thursday that attaching the two measures would also sink the defense bill in the Senate.

Meanwhile, another hard-liner, Rep. Chip Roy, responded to Trump’s call to lift the House gridlock with a new list of legislative demands for House leaders.

Johnson, for his part, focused on the positive. He told reporters at the Capitol after meeting Trump that he and the president are “on exactly the same page” about stopping “any blockade in the House.”

He also said Congress would be transmitting the housing affordability bill it cleared this week to the White House, after the president abruptly reversed course Wednesday on a signing ceremony for the bill and demanded Senate passage of the controversial election overhaul first.

What else we’re watching:

— HISPANIC CAUCUS BRACES FOR CHAIR’S SUCCESSOR: Hispanic Caucus members are still reeling from Chair Adriano Espaillat’s electoral defeat this week. But they’re warily preparing to welcome his successor — with some conditions. Darializa Avila Chevalier — a Democratic Socialist who ousted Espaillat in New York’s primary Tuesday, said Thursday in a statement she plans to join the CHC when she gets to Congress, which is all but guaranteed in November.

— COMER TO GRILL EPSTEIN-LINKED INVESTOR: Investor Leon Black will speak to House Oversight Friday for an interview Chair James Comer has called “the big one” in his panel’s investigation of the Jeffrey Epstein case. “It’s going to be hard for him to deny the questions we’re going to ask,” Comer told reporters this week.

Meredith Lee Hill, Jordain Carney, Riley Rogerson and Hailey Fuchs contributed to this report.

Congress

The Lincoln Memorial should be green with envy: This reflecting pool stayed clear

Published

7 hours ago

June 26, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Still blue waters, abundant waterfowl, promenading tourists and barely a whiff of mildew — that is the vision President Donald Trump has struggled to turn into reality this month at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.

But that has long been the reality just a mile-and-a-half down the National Mall, where another reflecting pool floats just under Capitol Hill — and under the radar — without a scummy green film floating on top.

As the algae-tinged drama has played out at the Lincoln Memorial, little attention has been paid to its sister pond which is slightly smaller, more obscure and managed by a different entity — the Architect of the Capitol, not the National Park Service.

Both are expensive and challenging to maintain, but the trapezoid-ish Capitol Reflecting Pool hasn’t faced the same intractable problems that have plagued the long and skinny pool to the west.

“Anytime you have a water feature in general … they are beautiful, they’re amazing, but they’re problematic because they degrade faster over time than pretty much anything else you’re going to have,” Architect of the Capitol Thomas Austin said in an interview Wednesday. “They require pumps, require pipes — corrosion, animals, diseases, bacteria, algae. There’s a lot of things that go along with that.”

Austin’s agency drains the Capitol pool each fall and sometimes in the spring to evaluate the basin and make repairs. Employees go in with heavy equipment to “remove the sludge that collects throughout the year,” according to a 2017 AOC report.

Then masons repair cracks and other issues with the concrete basin and plumbers tackle pipe and pump problems before refilling the pool. The draining, repairing and refilling can all happen within a week, depending on the extent of work needed, according to an internal AOC bulletin.

The Capitol Reflecting Pool is seen outside the U.S. Capitol in Washington, on June 25, 2026.

In contrast, draining and refilling the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool typically takes about a month.

There is no evidence that the National Park Service or White House sought the AOC’s expertise with reflecting pool maintenance before embarking on the recent renovations across town, which included spraying the floor with an “American flag blue” rubberized coating.

The Park Service has some experience with the Capitol pond: It managed the body until 2011, when Congress assumed control for itself in an omnibus spending bill — scuttling NPS plans for a shallower pool with an overnight draining system.

Instead, the Architect of the Capitol proceeded with a $7.3 million renovation that included draining the pool, thoroughly cleaning it and making repairs to the concrete.

Today, families of ducks call the Capitol Reflecting Pool home, and AOC craftspeople even fabricated and installed ramps to help ducklings make their way in and out of the water. (Some congressional fiscal hawks briefly balked at the expenditure.)

This week, a trio of dead ducks found at the Lincoln Memorial pool increased scrutiny of the Trump administration’s renovation, including the use of high-concentration hydrogen peroxide in the water to combat a recent algae bloom.

On Thursday, eyewitnesses who posted on social media reported the water appeared closer to sparkling, though some residual algae was spotted.

The White House did not address questions about whether it had consulted with the legislative branch on how to maintain a water body before embarking on the Lincoln Memorial project.

“Today, the Reflecting Pool is crystal clear and is reflecting perfectly,” White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers said in a statement, calling it a feat “only an expert builder like Donald J. Trump could accomplish.”

Austin also declined to weigh in on why the water at the Lincoln Memorial has been so much more troublesome than the Capitol’s.

“I will not say that our full reflecting pool is without problems, because it certainly does have some issues,” he said. “It’s also smaller, so that’s part of it, too. And it was kind of formulated in different ways, so it’s kind of hard to compare apples to apples on this one.”

The Capitol Reflecting Pool is seen outside the U.S. Capitol in Washington, on June 25, 2026.

The Capitol’s pool, sandwiched between two parking lots and the Ulysses S. Grant Memorial was completed in 1971, making it about half the age of the Lincoln Memorial’s. It has not always been without blight, however.

In 2020 there was an algae bloom during a stretch of particularly hot weather. And in 2008, when the pool was still under NPS control, at least two dozen dead ducks were removed from the water after avian botulism took hold. These days, some cracked stone can be spotted along the perimeter.

Several lawmakers who exercise oversight of the Capitol campus declined to say much to compare and contrast the two reflecting pools.

“I want to thank the Architect of the Capitol for keeping it clear and keeping it clean,” Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) said in an interview this week when asked if his time on the Legislative Branch Appropriations subcommittee gave him any insight into the pool.

“Size matters,” added Rep. Stephanie Bice (R-Okla.), a member of the House Administration Committee.

Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), the top Democrat on the Legislative Branch Appropriations subcommittee, said he believed the Trump administration’s rushed approach to the Lincoln Memorial rehab was the most obvious distinction between the health of the two pools.

“I mean, anybody with an eighth-grade science class could have predicted that this was not going to go well,” he said.