By Greg Giroux, CQ Staff

The already yawning campaign money gap between the major parties’ House campaign committees widened in May, according to reports filed on Friday by the well-funded Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) and its cash-strapped counterpart, the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC).

The DCCC’s report to the Federal Election Commission showed the committee raised $6.1 million and spent $4.2 million last month. The DCCC began June with $47.2 million left over, money that the committee will soon begin spending across the country in dozens of competitive races for House seats — nearly all of them currently held by Republicans — in an effort to expand its current 236-199 majority over the GOP.

The NRCC, by contrast, spent a bit more in May ($5.1 million) than it received ($5 million). The Republican campaign unit thus began June with slightly less money than at the beginning of the month: $6.7 million, or about one-seventh of what the DCCC had left to spend.

This is a drastic change from the situation at the same point two years ago, when the Republicans still controlled the House and were more than five months away from the 30-seat loss that cost them their majority. The NRCC at the end of May 2006 had $22.6 million left in the bank, just slightly less than $24.5 million in cash on hand reported by the resurgent DCCC.

This May was a very rough month politically for the NRCC, as its candidates failed to successfully defend the party’s hold in special elections held in Louisiana’s 6th District on May 3 and Mississippi’s 1st District on May 13. And the GOP committee’s balance sheet, which showed it ran slightly in the red for the month, illustrated the financial damage the party endured while losing those two conservative-leaning Southern districts to the Democrats.

The NRCC last month laid out $703,000 in “independent expenditures,” which are outlays for television and radio ads and mail pieces made independently of candidate campaigns. Most of these funds were spent in the run-up to the Mississippi contest in which Democrat Travis W. Childers was elected to succeed Republican Roger Wicker , who was appointed to a vacant Senate seat last December. The NRCC, despite an already looming deficit to the DCCC, poured in money after Childers outran Republican Greg Davis in the April 22 first-round contest and finished just short of the majority vote he needed to win the seat outright. But the GOP committee’s intervention could not preclude a stunning 8 percentage-point runoff win for Childers.

The GOP in May was financially involved to a lesser extent in the Louisiana 6 race, in which Democrat Don Cazayoux won by 3 points to defeat Republican Louis “Woody” Jenkins for the seat from which 11-term Republican Richard H. Baker resigned in February to head the trade association for hedge funds.

The DCCC also made heavy financial commitments to these contests, with $1.8 million in independent expenditures combined for May. But as the comparative overall money figures show, the Democratic committee could much better afford the risk involved in their efforts to capture these seats.

The DCCC continues to outperform the NRCC in raising money from individual donors, who are the largest source of contributions for party committees. But the DCCC also is thriving in attracting the unlimited contributions that members of Congress are allowed under law to transfer to national party committees from their own campaign committees.

There are 33 more Democrats in the U.S. House today than there were on Election Day 2006, including the 30 who took over Republican seats in that year’s contests; Bill Foster , who scored an especially symbolic victory with his March 8 special election win for the Illinois 14th District seat vacated by former House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert; and subsequent special election winners Cazayoux and Childers.

In May alone, House Democrats transferred more than $1.9 million to the DCCC. The top donors were Jackie Speier of California ($250,000), who won an April 8 special election in the Bay Area’s strongly Democratic 12th District, and Jim McGovern of Massachusetts’ 3rd District ($230,000), another Democratic stronghold, where the Republicans did not even field a challenger in three of the past four elections.

Speier and McGovern were among the 15 House Democrats who transferred at least $50,000 to the DCCC in May. Minority Leader John A. Boehner of Ohio’s 8th District was the only Republican who gave that much to the NRCC.

Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC)