He’s got problems, personally and politically
If President Joe Biden has any advantage going into the 2024 presidential election, it’s that former President Donald Trump’s legal fees and primary challenges are a significant drain on the Trump campaign’s finances.
Indeed, with money playing an increasingly prominent role in political campaigns, particularly presidential contests, both Trump and Biden are facing a very similar problem, albeit for different reasons, and to varying degrees. While both are raising less money than past candidates, and both are spending considerable sums, only Trump has to split his spending between politics and rapidly mounting legal costs.
Despite worrisome poll numbers in a head-to-head matchup with Trump — Biden trails 44 percent to 46 percent according to the RealClearPolitics average — and just 40 percent of Americans approving of Biden’s job performance, by the end of January, Biden and his various campaign arms have accumulated $130 million in cash, raising $42 million over the last month alone, according to Federal Election Commission filings.
Moreover, 97 percent of all of Biden’s donations are coming from donors giving less than $200, and in January alone, more than 420,000 individual donors made contributions, underscoring the small-money, grassroots support Biden can count on.
To be sure, Biden’s numbers are staggering compared to the Trump campaign, previously considered a fundraising behemoth after raising $774 million in the 2020 cycle. Today however, FEC filings show that Trump has about $30.5 million cash on hand and raised a dismal, if not extremely concerning, $13.8 million over the last month.
Worse, Trump’s campaign spent nearly $3 million more than it raised in January, taking in just under $9 million, but spending more than $11 million, as they continue spending on the Republican primary and his mounting legal fees.
Notably, over the last two months, the Trump campaign’s biggest expense was $4.7 million in Iowa and New Hampshire fending off Nikki Haley’s primary challenge. Not far behind, a Trump-connected PAC doled out $2.9 million to pay for the former president’s legal fees just in January alone.
These rising costs come at the same time Trump’s personal fortune is set to take a massive hit. In recent weeks, he lost two civil trials for fraud and defamation, amounting to $438 million in penalties that, due to campaign finance laws, he cannot use campaign funds to pay.
In 2019, Trump’s campaign committee collected $72 million in donations of $200 or less, according to OpenSecrets.
That amount represented a portion of the more than $378 million that was raised from around the time Trump filed to run for reelection in 2017 through Dec. 31, 2020, from small-dollar donors, according to the data. Much of that funding from small-dollar donors arrived in the election year 2020, with the campaign reeling in more than $264 million over the course of those 12 months from people who gave $200 or less to Trump.
But fast forward several years, and from November 2022 through the end of last year, Trump’s presidential campaign collected just $27 million in donations from those who gave $200 or less, according to the data.
That’s a difference of $45 million, and represents a 62.5% drop in small-dollar donations, from the year before the 2020 election, to the year before the 2024 election.
I’m sure he’ll end up raising a lot of cash and he’ll be able to get suckers to pay for his legal fees too. But it’s telling that he, of all people, is falling way behind Biden in the money wars. What this say to me is that there is more enthusiasm on the Democratic side than people think and that includes people with a lot of money and many small donors.
I think the so-called enthusiasm gap is a “vibe” and not a very meaningful one. No, Democrats aren’t running around with gigantic Biden flags and they don’t deck themselves out in Biden gear from head to toe (or buy their way into his beach club, dressed like low-rent Real Housewives) like a bunch of teenage Swifties.
What they do is vote and they’ve been crawling over hot coals to vote since the 2018 election.