Anti-Trump Republican candidates say they see donor bumps when they attack him

A few Republican presidential candidates polling near the middle and back of the primary field say they have found a fundraising sweet spot: Cash flows in when they jab at front-runner Donald Trump, even if their voter support doesn't jump the same way.

Former Vice President Mike Pence, former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson and former Texas Rep. Will Hurd are among the 2024 GOP hopefuls still trying to meet the donor thresholds in order to make it on the first Republican primary debate stage, on Aug. 23 in Milwaukee.

But all three are inching nearer to the Republican National Committee-set benchmark of meeting 40,000 unique donors from 20 different states, according to the candidates or their campaigns -- progress that coincides with what aides and sources describe as donation surges after the candidates rebuke the former president.

At the same time, however, none of the candidates have seen their polling numbers jump in the same way, according to FiveThirtyEight.

In Pence's case, his numbers have been dropping for more than a week even as he has shared some of his strongest criticism to date of his old boss.

Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a vocally anti-Trump Republican candidate who has already passed the donor threshold and has polled high enough to make the debate, also has seen certain bumps in fundraising after earned media hits, according to his campaign. Many of those appearances hit directly at Trump.

According to a polling average by FiveThirtyEight, Pence was at 4.9% in an aggregation of national surveys as of Thursday while Hutchinson was at 0.8% and Hurd was at 0.2%. Christie was at 1.8%.

Trump, by contrast, maintains an enormous national lead in early primary surveys and was at 53.3% on Thursday. He has repeatedly dismissed other Republicans who attack him, as when he claimed Christie was a "failed" governor and candidate.

“They're polling at zero, many of these guys,” Trump told Fox News in June of his opponents.

At the Lincoln Dinner in Iowa last week, Hurd was booed off the Des Moines stage for publicly lashing out at Trump over Trump's mounting legal challenges, including three indictments. (Trump denies wrongdoing in each).

Hurd said that he was “expecting” the indignation, but his campaign said that after the viral remarks he gained a “significant amount of traction.”

“Donor intensity has increased, voter engagement and grassroots interest has seen a major uptick, and a number of our internal campaign metrics have substantially improved,” a campaign spokesperson said.

Pence also appeared to gain financial momentum this week as he took on his former running mate more directly, in the wake of Trump's third indictment, related to Jan. 6 and his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

The Pence campaign on Thursday began offering "Too Honest" merchandise -- referencing how Trump has described him, according to the indictment -- and Pence's campaign said the merchandise could put him over the 40,000-donor mark required to make the debate stage.

According to the new indictment, Trump “berated" Pence in a New Year's Day phone call in 2021 and told him, "You're too honest," after Pence said he didn't have a constitutional basis to return or reject electoral votes in his role as president of the Senate.

More than 7,400 individuals donated to Pence online on Wednesday, the same day he passed the 30,000-donor mark, coinciding with the former vice president offering some of sharpest condemnation yet of his former boss.

That same day, Pence told reporters at the Indiana State Fair: "The president was surrounded by a group of crackpot lawyers that kept telling him what his itching ears wanted to hear. And while I made my case to him, with what I understood my oath of the Constitution to require, the president ultimately continued to demand that I choose him over the Constitution."

Pence has already met the RNC polling criteria required for entrance on the debate stage.

Hutchinson has likewise seen “measurable increases in small dollar donations when he is critical of the former president,” according to a source close to his campaign, noting that there are significant upticks in donations when he appears on CNN.

Hutchinson -- who has loudly rebuked Trump, like Hurd and Christie -- has said he met the polling criteria to get on the debate but has a “long ways to go” getting donors before candidates hit the stage in three weeks.

“Just yesterday, we had 900 brand-new donors to our campaign. That's a lot in my book. And so, let's continue this so we make the debate stage. We need your help in that,” Hutchinson said in New Hampshire on Wednesday.

ABC News' Libby Cathey contributed to this report.