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Trump erases Biden’s lead in 2024 elections after conviction

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Former President Donald J. Trump surpassed President Biden for the second month in a row in May, outpacing his successor by about $81 million in donations over the past two months as he rode a wave of financial support following his felony conviction.

Less than two months after Biden’s shared operation with the Democratic National Committee had a monetary advantage of around $100 million over Trump and the Republican National Committee, the situation is now reversed, according to the two campaigns.

Biden entered June with a combined $212 million in hand with the party. The Trump operation and the RNC got $235 million, the campaign said.

Trump’s joint operation surpassed Biden’s by $141 million to $85 million in May, after raising $25 million more than Biden’s team in April.

Trump’s main campaign committee also had more money than Biden’s: $116.5 million to $91.6 million, according to Federal Election Commission records.

The full accounting of both sides’ finances will be made public in federal filings next month. But the combination of Trump’s improved fundraising and Biden’s heavier spending on advertising this spring appears to put both sides on track to enter the summer relatively close to financial parity.

“Yes, Trump is raising a lot more money now, and that should scare people,” said Brian Derrick, a strategist who founded a Democratic fundraising platform called Oath. “But at the end of the day, Biden has the funds necessary to run a really strong campaign.”

Trump narrowed the gap by bringing a deluge of donations online following his felony conviction in New York on May 30. In the minutes after the verdict, guilty on 34 criminal charges, contributions arrived so quickly that they arrived briefly overwhelmed the Republican Party’s online donation portal, WinRed.

The Trump campaign said this raised US$53 million online in the first 24 hours and $70 million in the first 48 hours after the verdict. The conviction also triggered a torrent of mega-actions, including a $50 million contribution from reclusive billionaire Timothy Mellon to a pro-Trump super PAC the day after the verdict.

Late in the Republican primary race, Biden’s campaign and its allies argued that for all of the president’s electoral vulnerabilities — persistent inflation, low approval ratings, lingering concerns about his age — a clear advantage would be money.

Even though that advantage has since evaporated, Biden’s campaign says it has used its early financial lead to build a political infrastructure in swing states that will pay dividends in November. On Thursday, the campaign announced it had hired its 1,000th employee for 200 offices in those states.

“What’s in his FEC report doesn’t translate into action on the ground tomorrow,” Dan Kanninen, Biden’s swing states director, said in an interview. “This has been built over time and Donald Trump cannot recover.”

Steven Cheung, Trump’s communications director, said Biden wasted money on ineffective television advertising.

“President Trump’s record fundraising numbers prove that corrupt Joe Biden’s witch hunt against President Trump, skyrocketing inflation, and illegal border crossings have united the American people around the fact that four more years of Biden will mean the end of our country,” Mr. Cheung said.

Money alone is rarely decisive in major races, such as the presidency, because voters are already well informed about the candidates. But some of this year’s most important voters appear to be those who left – and getting to them can cost a lot of money.

For months, Trump and his allies simply didn’t have the money to reach these voters. While his path to the Republican nomination was not blunt, he emerged from the primary race in relatively poor financial shape compared to Biden’s operation, which had been hoarding cash for nearly a year.

Biden consolidated his party’s biggest donors. Trump didn’t do it on his end.

But this slow start also gave Trump much more room to grow. In the weeks after he dispatched Nikki Haley, his last Republican rival, Trump’s packers described an almost stealthy effort to get back into his good graces.

A fundraising dinner at Trump’s Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago, in mid-February, a few weeks before Haley’s departure, served as a major turning point as Trump fundraisers signaled hesitant donors that the moment for indecision was coming to an end. A fundraising dinner hosted by John Paulson, a hedge fund billionaire, raised $50 million, the campaign said. And just in the last month, the wealthy resisters as Blackstone co-founder Stephen A. Schwarzman have signaled they plan to support Trump.

Completing the nomination also allowed Trump to form a joint fundraising committee with the national and state Republican parties, a seemingly technical step that meant he could suddenly raise hundreds of thousands of dollars more from each donor. Biden had been raising money in larger installments for many months.

Online contributions will be increasingly crucial in the future because campaigns cannot turn to their biggest donors for repeat contributions. And Trump’s base appears to have been highly animated by his conviction. His campaign said a quarter of taxpayers in May were new.

The question for Trump is how many of these people become repeat collaborators. The Biden campaign has aggressively cultivated repeat contributors online, a group that accounted for $5.5 million in April and more than that in May, although the campaign did not provide a specific number.

So far, Biden has enjoyed a tremendous publicity advantage over Trump.

From the beginning of the year through this month, Biden’s operation transmitted or booked about $35.4 million in the six key battleground states. Trump’s operation broadcast virtually nothing in those states, about $60,000 worth of ads, according to records from AdImpact, a media monitoring company.

Trump advisers say the fact that Biden has spent tens of millions of dollars in key states without altering the trajectory of the race bodes ill for the president’s chances in November.

Biden fundraisers insist they will maintain an advantage when outside groups are counted. The constellation of pro-Biden super PACs and nonprofit groups outspent Trump allies by about 50% in the six most contested battlegrounds, according to data from AdImpact.

Still, Biden’s dominance of the airwaves is not likely to continue.

Trump’s main super PAC, Make America Great Again Inc., and its nonprofit arm, which can keep its donors secret, paid nearly $17 million in the first half of the year for ads in Pennsylvania, the only battleground where it made a significant impact. investment.

But this week, MAGA Inc. began booking nearly $30 million in airtime starting in early July in Pennsylvania and Georgia as part of what it said will be a $100 million summer advertising campaign. Other pro-Trump super PACs are also beginning to plan advertising efforts.

Democratic fundraisers for Biden said they expected Trump to eventually catch up with them and received such guidance explicitly from Rufus Gifford, the campaign’s top fundraising official, in recent briefings. A Biden funder compared the 2024 race to the summer of 2012, when Mitt Romney steadily chipped away at President Barack Obama’s fundraising lead.

Other Democratic allies were more surprised by the recent turn of events, speculating that the lasting political impact of Trump’s conviction will not be on voters but rather on donors.

“It’s desperate to see the money rush stabilize,” said Jon Reinish, a Democratic political strategist. “That should be one of Biden’s real advantages. He’s also been spending money for months and that doesn’t seem to be changing the situation much in terms of research. We hope this changes as we get even closer.”

For now, Biden is racing to replenish his coffers in June. He held a $30 million event in Los Angeles with Obama and Hollywood stars, as well as an $8 million fundraiser on Tuesday at the home of Terry McAuliffe, the former governor of Virginia, with ex -President Bill Clinton among those present. .

Others hope Biden surrogates can help raise money.

On the day of the first general election debate next week, three prominent Democratic governors — Andy Beshear of Kentucky, JB Pritzker of Illinois and Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan — will be in Los Angeles for a fundraiser.

At the same time, a wide range of Republican vice presidential candidates will headline a debate-watching party in Atlanta that will also serve as a fundraiser.

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