Status Report: The Parties’ Fundraising

A big Palm Beach billionaire buddy fundraiser by Trump sought to close the gap.

We’ve known it was coming for some time. A private Mar-a-Lago gathering on Saturday night of some of Trump’s biggest billionaire backers, all primed to give the maximum amount of over $800K to the joint fundraising efforts of the Trump Campaign, his Save America PAC, and the Republican National Committee, which is now staffed with his family members and loyalists and firmly under Trump’s control.

If the Trump Campaign is to believed—and we should put a fairly big asterisk next to anything that isn’t an official FEC filing, given who we’re dealing with—the evening raised in excess of $50 million, a sum they boast is twice what Democrats raised in New York City, even with two other former presidents helping. (The statement by the Trump Campaign speaks of “pledged” amounts over $50 million that may or may not ever come in, so I’m going to wait until I see the official published tally at the end of this quarter.)

Trading barbs

The Biden Campaign was quick to rip on the event and to draw a sharp contrast to its own fundraising methods and backers. The Washington Post reported on the two camps’ war of words.

“This thing this weekend is a handful of billionaires figuring out how to pay his legal bills, and we’ve got millions of grass-roots donors who are powering our campaign,” said Rob Flaherty, a Biden deputy campaign manager.

As for who attended the fundraiser, the campaign blasted them as “tax avoiders, scammers, racists, and extremists.”

The Biden Campaign brought some receipts to back up its attacks, which it promptly put out across digital media. More on that below.

The Trump folks were fairly crowing about the successful money raise. “Our digital online fundraising continues to skyrocket, our major donor investments are climbing, and Democrats are running scared of the fundraising prowess of President Trump,” said a statement by Trump campaign communications director Steven Cheung, though, as I’ll discuss below, this is a stretch.

“For the joint fundraising committee for Trump to come right behind [the Democrats’ New York event] and raise well over 50 percent more,” boasted another source, who remained anonymous to discuss party dynamics, “that sends a message to Republican donors who may be trying to decide how much they’re going to play this year that they’ve turned this thing around rapidly.”

But have they? Let’s break this down.

Big small-dollar differences

Until this month, Democrats have been steadily outpacing Republicans in both total funds raised and, importantly, in small dollar donations. This matters for two reasons: the money itself and what it says about donor enthusiasm. Particularly among small-dollar donors, the record for the Democrats outshines that of the GOP:

There are a few reasons for this difference in the parties’ fundraising records, but one really stands out: Trump has oversaturated the GOP donor base.

During his Big Lie campaign in late 2020 and early 2021, Trump’s Super PAC raised huge, nine-figure sums from the MAGA faithful, falsely representing to them that the money was needed for legal battles around challenging a stolen election. Later, Trump used that money to pay his own “yuge” and personal legal bills. Then that well started to go dry, too, especially as the number of cases against him mounted in 2022 and 2023. Those hundreds of millions are nearly gone.

Trump’s practice was to send multiple daily emails and texts to his base, pleading for money. He guilted them. He accused them of being weak. He played upon their fears. But most of all, he barraged them.

The effect has been small donor fatigue and a huge drop off in what Trump has been able to squeeze from them. The Washington Post reported last week on the drop off in small-dollar donations to Trump. The difference between 2020 and 2024 is striking:

In 2020, Trump and his fundraising committees raised a record $626.6 million from small-dollar donors, 35 percent more than Biden took in from that group.

But last year, Trump raised just $51 million from small donors, way down from the $119 million he registered in 2019 and only 18 percent more than Biden’s total. His small-dollar haul — which includes donations of $200 or less — was not nearly enough to offset Biden’s lead among major donors.

“The biggest problem in GOP fundraising is that we don’t treat donors well,” said John Hall, a small-dollar fundraiser for the GOP. “Sending eight emails and texts a day that promise an artificial match, threaten to take away your GOP membership, or call you a traitor if you don’t donate doesn’t build a long-term relationship with donors.”

To counter the slump, Trump and those who write his fundraising asks have figured out something else: that he raises more money on days he says or posts controversial things. It’s usually messages that that own or threaten the libs or make him out to be the victim of overzealous prosecutors. It’s a cycle that leads to ever greater extremist rhetoric because the old messaging just doesn’t move the needle anymore. (This is in part why extremist movements tend only to grow more extreme; like a junkie, the fix needed is ever stronger in order to produce the desired effect, until of course it all becomes unsustainable.)

Does the money matter?

Experts are divided over whether the current Democratic advantage in fundraising will matter that much in the end, particularly if Trump can get to a high baseline of support despite a persistent gap with the Democrats.

First, it’s a bit of an apple and orange candidate situation. Joe Biden has been able to fundraise as the party’s leader without the DNC having to be agnostic the way the RNC has had to be up until recently. Trump had to spend some of his own time and money winning primaries in states like Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina. Now that he’s the presumptive nominee, the GOP and its fundraising machine have closed ranks behind him.

Second, we’re still talking about only eight likely battleground states, and while ads will be expensive, with funds in the hundreds of millions for each candidate we can expect saturation of the television and digital ad markets by the candidates. Because this is a rematch of 2020, neither has to spend any effort letting voters know who they are. For both, it’s about bringing as many of their voters back to the fold.

Third, there’s the ground game. Biden is way out ahead on this, having already opened scores of campaign offices in critical swing states. He has 100 offices in Michigan, for example, while Trump has yet to open a single one. But will it matter? Some liken the effect of the ground game as a “field goal” at best—the ability for each office to get a few hundred more voters to vote than they might have otherwise. But in states where the election will be decided by less than one percent, any field goal will matter.

Oh, the villainy!

The Mar-a-Lago fundraiser came with a guest list printed up for the world to see.

So who are some of those chairpersons, giving $814,600 each, whom the Biden campaign derided as scoundrels, cheats and hate-mongers?

Hats off to the quick digital team at Biden HQ. I’m going to list a few of the receipts it produced in a viral social media thread. Feel free to share this article so that more know about this particular collection of the deplorable MAGA über-wealthy

“Trump donor John Paulson wants to cut Social Security and opposed financial regulations to protect Americans after the 2008 crash, which he profited off of.”

“Trump donor Robert Bigelow complained he couldn’t evict tenants out of his buildings during the pandemic and supports Florida’s extreme Don’t Say Gay law.”

“Trump donor John Catsimatidis compared taxes on the wealthy to Hitler killing Jews and his business has been forced to pay millions in lawsuits over unfair labor practices and consumer safety violations.”

Trump donor José “Pepe” Fanjul refused to fire his assistant who was married to (two!) KKK leaders, commenting via a company spokesperson that “we wouldn’t terminate them for that.”

“Trump donor Jamie McCourt pocketed over $10 million from her stock shares before public citizens were made aware of the pandemic’s severity, all while Trump played down the virus.”

“Trump donor and failed GOP Senator Kelly Loeffler touted 2020 election lies, backed an anti-LGBTQ adoption agency, and supported ripping away health care from millions of Americans by repealing the Affordable Care Act.“

“Trump donor Robert Mercer opposes the Civil Rights Act of 1964, calling it a major mistake, and believes the government is backwards for helping “weak people get strong.”

“Trump donor Jeff Yass has avoided $1 billion in taxes and wants to privatize Social Security.”

“Trump donor Woody Johnson has repeatedly disparaged women for their looks and questioned why the Black community celebrates Black History Month.”

And many more!

Bottom line? Small-dollar donors are getting exhausted by and are tapping out for Trump, so he’s turned to his horrible rich friends to close the gap. But there are limits to how much this will help; once they’ve maxed out their donations, which his campaign claims many did on Saturday night, he’ll have to find others to keep the money flowing in.

And meanwhile, his newly public Trump Media stock has lost nearly half its value since it went public, and those lawyers and those civil judgments aren’t getting any cheaper.

Have a restful Sunday, and I’ll see you back here tomorrow.

Jay