From Texas Standard.
On May 31, President Donald Trump will be back in Texas for lunch – $5,000 per plate – with well heeled Houstonians, then that evening he’ll preside at a dinner in Dallas.
Kevin Diaz, a reporter for the Houston Chronicle, says Trump is expected to do quite well fundraising in Texas now that big money contributors are reopening their wallets for the GOP.
After last summer’s struggle to repeal the Affordable Care Act, Republican donors felt burned by their own party.
“For years they had been not only campaigning on repeal and replace, but fundraising on repeal and replace,” Diaz says. “A lot of Republicans thought the stars were aligned when Donald Trump was elected president and they had majorities in the Senate and the House. Amazingly, they just couldn’t get it done in the end because they really didn’t have an alternative that they could sell across the political spectrum, or at least enough of it to get it passed through the Senate.”
Tax cuts have brought GOP donors back to the party, though.
“They expect to do quite a bit better than the $4.3 million they did last September,” Diaz says. “There was definitely a pause. And a lot of donors were talking to each other, calling each other, emailing, texting, and saying, ‘Hey, we’ve got to show these people in Washington that they’re not getting the job done. How do we show them?’”
A competitive Senate race may also be prompting GOP donors to contribute again.
“There’s a lot of energy on the left, obviously, because there’s a lot of anger with Trump,” he says. “So Beto O’Rourke running for the Senate against Ted Cruz in Texas is benefitting from that. He’s getting money from all over the country. People like to put their hopes, for some reason, in Texas, and so they do.”
Written by Jen Rice.
