Morning Digest: Pennsylvania Republican learns the hard way not to gamble donor funds in the markets

The Daily Kos Elections Morning Digest is compiled by David Nir, Jeff Singer, Stephen Wolf, and Carolyn Fiddler, with additional contributions from David Jarman, Steve Singiser, Daniel Donner, James Lambert, David Beard, and Arjun Jaikumar.

Leading Off

● PA-Gov: Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf has been in strong shape for re-election all cycle, and he continued his dominance by widely outraising his Republican challenger, former state Sen. Scott Wagner, over the last several months. But the most amazing detail to come out of the candidates' new financial reports is the fact, uncovered by Daily Kos contributing editor Adam Bonin, that Wagner reported losing $631,000 in campaign funds between June 5 and Sept. 17 thanks to unsuccessful investments in a brokerage account.

As Bonin notes, it's astoundingly irresponsible to invest donor money, as Wagner's huge losses show. In fact, an earlier report saw Wagner's investments drop by an astonishing $1.5 million, though in other periods, he's seen gains—but that's exactly the point: The extreme volatility of investing in securities poses a huge risk to funds that contributors are entrusting to you. What's more, the stock market has made solid gains this year (the S&P 500 is up over 9 percent in 2018), so how in the hell did Wagner manage to lose so much money while most investors were doing well?

Wagner both gambled with his campaign funds (which he shouldn't have done) and lost big (which seemingly only he was capable of). For a struggling campaign, that can't possibly make donors happy.