Trump campaign cash advantage slips away
Money was supposed to have been one of the great advantages of incumbency for President Donald Trump, much as it was for President Barack Obama in 2012 and George W. Bush in 2004. After getting outspent in 2016, Trump filed for re- election on the day of his inauguration — earlier than any other modern president — betting that the head start would deliver him a decisive financial advantage this year.
It seemed to have worked. His rival, Joe Biden, was relatively broke when he emerged as the presumptive Democratic nominee this spring, and Trump and the Republican National Committee had a nearly $ 200 million cash advantage.
Five months later, Trump’s financial supremacy has evaporated. Of the $ 1.1 billion his campaign and the party raised from the beginning of 2019 through July, more than $ 800 million has been spent. Now
some people inside the campaign are forecasting what was once unthinkable: a cash crunch with less than 60 days until the election, according to Republican officials briefed on the matter.
Brad Parscale, the former campaign manager, liked to call Trump’s re- election war machine an “unstoppable juggernaut.” But interviews with more than a dozen current and former campaign aides and Trump allies, and a review of thousands of items in federal campaign filings, show that the president’s campaign and the RNC developed some profligate habits as they burned through hundreds of millions of dollars. Since Bill Stepien replaced Parscale in July, the campaign has imposed a series of belt- tightening measures that have reshaped initiatives, including hiring practices, travel and the advertising budget.
Under Parscale, more than $ 350 million — almost half of the $ 800 million spent — went to fundraising operations, as no expense was spared in finding new donors online. The campaign assembled a big and well- paid staff and housed the team at a cavernous office in the Virginia suburbs; outsize legal bills were treated as campaign costs; and more than $ 100 million was spent on a television advertising blitz before the party convention, the point when most of the electorate historically begins to pay close attention to the race.
Among the splashiest and perhaps most questionable purchase was for Super Bowl ads that cost $ 11 million — more than the campaign has spent on TV in some top battleground states — a vanity splurge that allowed Trump to match billionaire and then- Democratic contender Michael Bloomberg’s buy for the big game.
Critics of the campaign’s management say the lavish spending was ineffective: Trump enters the fall trailing in most national and battleground state polls, and Biden has surpassed him as a fundraising powerhouse, after posting a record- setting haul of nearly $ 365 million in August. The Trump campaign has not revealed its August fundraising figure.
“If you spend $ 800 million and you’re 10 points behind, I think you’ve got to answer the question, ‘ What was the game plan?’ ” said Ed Rollins, a veteran Republican strategist who runs a small proTrump super PAC, and who accused Parscale of spending “like a drunken sailor.”
“I think a lot of money was spent when voters weren’t paying attention,” he added.
Parscale, now a senior adviser on the campaign, said in an interview that the Trump operation invested heavily in attracting donors to erase the large advantage that Democrats had built digitally after the Obama years. “We closed that gap,” he said, crediting early spending as “the only reason Republicans are even close” in terms of online fundraising.
At the top of the whiteboard in Stepien’s office are the latest numbers on the campaign budget, and Stepien has instituted a number of changes since he was promoted from deputy campaign manager. A proposal to spend $ 50 million in costs related to coalitions groups was cast aside. An idea to spend $ 3 million for a NASCAR car bearing Trump’s name was discarded.
Most visibly, the Trump campaign slashed its television spending in August, mostly abandoning the airwaves during the party conventions. In the last two weeks of the month, Biden’s campaign spent $ 35.9 million on television ads, compared with $ 4.8 million for Trump, according to data from Advertising Analytics.
“We held on to cash to make sure that we’ll have the firepower that we need” for the fall, said Jason Miller, a senior strategist for Trump, who contended that airing ads during the conventions would prove a waste for Biden. “We want to make sure that we’re saving it for when it really matters, when it’s going to move the needle.”
One of the reasons Biden was able to wipe away Trump’s early cash edge was that he sharply contained costs with a minimalistic campaign during the worst months of the pandemic. Trump officials derisively dismissed it as his “basement” strategy, but from that basement Biden fully embraced Zoom fundraisers, with top donors asked to give as much as $ 720,000.