President Trump and the RNC raised more than $105 million during the just-concluded second quarter, surpassing a record set by former President Obama and the DNC:
WASHINGTON — President Trump’s re-election campaign and the Republican National Committee on Tuesday said they had raised $105 million in the second quarter of this year, dwarfing what President Barack Obama raised in the equivalent period during his re-election campaign.
The campaign and the R.N.C. said they had a combined $100 million in cash on hand, and that they had raised more money online in the second quarter than in the first half of 2018. The staggering total figure can be plowed into television and digital advertising, get-out-the-vote efforts and other activities related to the 2020 election.
Mr. Trump and his committees raised $54 million, they said, and the R.N.C. raised $51 million. The campaign officials did not say how many individual donors had contributed, or how many gave money in increments of $200 or less. The official report, which will include spending, will be filed with the Federal Election Commission on July 15.
Mr. Trump has not sought to restrict who can give money to his campaign.The president’s campaign manager, Brad Parscale, called it a “massive fund-raising success” based on enthusiasm for Mr. Trump’s record, which he said no Democratic candidate could match.
Ronna McDaniel, the chairwoman of the R.N.C., said the fund-raising allowed the committee to “identify troves of new supporters online and continue investing in our unprecedented field program.”
For a president who values large numbers and has told aides that he wants record-breaking fund-raising reports, the figures are expected to be particularly rewarding.
And the amount of money that was both raised and stored away will be daunting for Mr. Trump’s eventual challenger, underscoring the benefits of incumbency.
In 2011, during the same period, Mr. Obama’s re-election campaign raised $47 million, and the Democratic National Committee brought in $38 million, Jim Messina, the Obama campaign manager, said at the time.
The advantage that the President has over his Democratic rivals, of course, is the fact that his fundraising can be essentially exclusively for the 2020 General Election campaign rather than having to worry about splitting fundraising between a primary campaign and a General Election campaign. While former Massachusetts Governor Bill Weld is running against the President, he’s unlikely to pose enough of a challenge for the President to have to worry about spending anything above a relative pittance to secure the GOP nomination. This means his war chest will be essentially full when the 2020 campaign begins after the respective party conventions. Democrats, on the other hand, will have to worry about splitting fundraising between two campaigns as they struggle to be the one candidate out of 24 who ends up winning the right to face Trump in the fall.
No doubt, we’ll see bigger numbers than this as 2019 and 2020 go on.
