Trump’s Record Second Quarter Fundraising Total Not-So Grand Compared To Democratic Field’s

Trump’s fundraising total is impressive, but when you add up what all the Democratic candidates are generating, they are outraising him.

This presidential election cycle is unique in a lot of ways. For example, it is unusual to have an angry racist ham sprinkled with yellow Easter grass running against something like 7,000 people you’ve never heard of.

But the uniqueness spills over into more substantive areas as well, and one of those is how the candidates are building their election war chests. We have definitely seen the influence of small online donors in previous elections. But this is really the first presidential election in which they have become such a driving political force.

All the presidential candidates had to file paperwork with the Federal Election Commission detailing their second quarter fundraising totals by (literally) the end of the day on July 15. I guess anyone who didn’t meet the midnight deadline turned into a pumpkin or something. But a number of the candidates were getting their work done early, and that included Trump, whose campaign announced well in advance of the deadline that their second quarter haul would be more than $100 million. As of the reporting deadline, the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee raised a combined $108 million during April, May, and June. That outpaced the $85 million combined fundraising total of President Obama and the Democratic National Committee during the equivalent period of 2011.

Of course, it’s not all that surprising that the party of big money, well, brought in a lot of big money. The Republican donor class, many of whom turned up their noses at Trump the last time around, are now flocking to him in droves. For example, one percent of the combined Trump and RNC second quarter haul came from just three people:

  • Stephen Rosenberg, founder and CEO of real estate company Greystone, contributed $360,600 to the Trump Victory Committee, a joint Trump and RNC fundraising apparatus.
  • Billionaire Isaac Perlmutter, chairman of Marvel Entertainment, also gave $360,600 to the Trump Victory Committee.
  • Perlmutter’s wife, Laura Perlmutter, offered her own matching $360,600 contribution. Isn’t it cute when couples share a pastime together, like handing out more money than most working people make in a decade to fund a xenophobic presidential campaign?

Even though the Trump campaign fundraising efforts are supported by a solid bulwark of the one percent, his appeal among the unwashed masses is nothing to scoff at either. According to Trump campaign officials (who probably didn’t totally make up their stats, but maybe take the exact numbers with a grain of salt), individual online donations to reelect Trump averaged $48 apiece during the second quarter, and a total of 725,000 small donors contributed. That is only two-tenths of one percent of the U.S. population. Still, nearly a whole Seattle-worth of online donors at this stage in the election cycle is a pretty solid base of donor support.

The Democrats were all over the map, which is not at all unexpected given that Americans, except maybe those with that tree-man disease, have fewer digits than Democratic presidential candidates at the moment. But the top tier candidates all did quite well. The top five, by second quarter fundraising total, were:

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  • Mayor Pete, with $24.8 million (for your reference, if this is the first time you’re hearing about him, his last name is pronounced “boot-edge-edge”);
  • Former VP Joe Biden, despite a few notable gaffes, at $21.5 million;
  • Senator Elizabeth Warren policy-hounded her way to $19.1 million (she has a plan for that);
  • Senator Bernie Sanders came in with $18 million, not bad but no political revolution either; and, finally,
  • Senator Kamala Harris leveraged her strong debate performance at the end of the quarter to pull in just shy of $12 million.

Out of those, the most impressive total to me is actually Elizabeth Warren’s, because out of the top three Democratic fundraisers, she is the only one who has largely eschewed big-donor events and PAC or lobbyist money.

I’m not going to go into the rest of the Democratic candidates individually, because I only have a limited number of words to hold your attention in these articles and who cares about the rest of the candidates anyway, but suffice it to say that the next 15 Democratic candidates combined raised about $33.6 million. That puts the total for all of the Democratic candidates at $129 million, and that does not even include however much the DNC raised in Q2 (which will be less than the RNC raised, but will still be several million dollars).

Trump’s second quarter campaign fundraising total is impressive, no doubt. But when you add up what all the Democratic candidates are generating, they are outraising him, and by quite a lot. The likelihood of an ultimate Democratic fundraising victory, of course, depends on the willingness of Democratic donors to coalesce around a smaller and smaller group of candidates as the field is slowly winnowed down. Only time will tell if “anyone but Trump” will be a strong enough rallying cry to again entice veteran Democratic donors after their candidates of choice drop out.


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Jonathan Wolf is a litigation associate at a midsize, full-service Minnesota firm. He also teaches as an adjunct writing professor at Mitchell Hamline School of Law, has written for a wide variety of publications, and makes it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.