Donald Trump has unleashed a fundraising wave following his conviction in the first criminal trial of a former or sitting president, all but erasing President Joe Biden’s once-massive fundraising advantage in a 2024 election rematch.
In May, the former president and the Republican National Committee vastly outperformed Biden and the Democratic National Committee for the second month in a row. And the president’s huge cash-on-hand advantage over Trump appears to have disappeared.
The Biden campaign’s months-long lead in cash spending allowed his team to drown out Trump on the airwaves and build impressive ground against the Trump campaign’s more frugal base. The game works.
But Trump’s fundraising has increased significantly since winning the Republican nomination in early March and has surged since he was convicted of 34 felonies in a New York City trial, now allowing him to compete with Biden in an advertising war. Climb the enemy and potentially set up a sizable ground operation.
Biden’s fundraising volume in May was huge, but far less than Trump’s
Donald Trump arrives at Trump Tower on Thursday, May 30, 2024, after being found guilty on 34 counts of first-degree falsification of business records. (Felipe Ramales, Fox News Digital)
While Biden’s campaign has spent more than $65 million on broadcast ads to support the president’s reelection, the Trump campaign has yet to launch a general election ad buy, according to AdImpact, a leading national ad tracking firm.
But Biden’s ad war advantage may soon be challenged. Make America Great Again (MAGA) Inc., a super PAC supporting the former president, announced a $100 million advertising campaign this summer. The group announced the news immediately after receiving a stunning $50 million donation from conservative banking heir Timothy Mellon.
In terms of ground gaming, the Biden campaign announced on Thursday that it has 200 campaign offices and 1,000 staff in key battleground states that will determine the rematch of the 2024 election.
Conservative banking heir Mellon Bloomberg spends millions supporting Biden, Trump
Dan Kanninen, battleground state director for the Biden campaign, said in a statement: “With just over four months until the election, Donald Trump could not match our battleground infrastructure even if he tried. .
“While Trump’s team desperately tries to frame the lack of infrastructure as ‘strategic,’ the bottom line is that Donald Trump cannot buy back the time he has lost — a stealth campaign cannot will win.
President Joe Biden’s re-election campaign on Wednesday accused MSNBC and CNN of ignoring a “Black voters support Biden-Harris” rally in Philadelphia. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
Jason Miller, a senior adviser to the Trump campaign, countered, pointing to polls in key battleground states showing Trump with a slight advantage.
“What Biden could use is getting 1,000 more votes in states like Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania because he lost to President Trump in all of those states!” Miller claimed.
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The Trump campaign said it and the Republican National Committee have offices in key battleground states but declined to disclose specific numbers. The campaign reiterated that its paid staff and volunteer operations are “increasingly expanding”.
But Trump’s campaign has emphasized for months that it is building a “leaner” operation than it was when the then-White House president was running for re-election in 2020. The company is planning to reduce the number of offices and staff and outsource to some extent as it relies on alliance groups to strengthen its ground operations.
Republican presidential candidate and former President Trump takes the stage during a campaign event in Racine, Wisconsin, Tuesday, June 18, 2024. (AP Photo/Jeffrey Phelps) (AP Photo/Jeffrey Phelps)
“Trump definitely needs to take some steps to catch up to the infrastructure that Biden has put in place,” Greg Moore, regional director for Americans for Prosperity, a conservative advocacy group, told Fox News.
But Moore, a veteran of the organization’s strong grassroots outreach and ground game efforts, said “Team Trump still has a great opportunity to start developing the infrastructure and focus on developing a real, real grassroots strategy.”
When it comes to the Trump campaign, Moore believes, “There’s no question that there’s a lot of energy from supporters. The level of enthusiasm among Trump supporters is higher than the level of enthusiasm among Biden supporters, which means that although staff growth may “will lean towards Biden” and actually recruiting real volunteers is an area where Trump should have an advantage. “
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