Trump campaign's fundraising boost helps erase Biden's cash advantage

Just two months ago, when former President Donald Trump had just begun raising money with the Republican Party as its new presumptive nominee, his team was trailing President Joe Biden and the Democratic Party by nearly $100 million in campaign cash on hand. Now Trump has rapidly outpaced Biden in fundraising.

This new surge in the Trump campaign's fundraising effectively closes the money edge Biden's campaign had boasted earlier this election cycle as the competitive November general election looms. The Trump fundraising boost gives him plenty of fresh cash to potentially spend on advertising after next week's debate.

The Biden campaign on Thursday announced that the campaign and the Democratic National Committee’s joint fundraising operation raised $85 million in May -- significantly less than the whopping $141 million total the Trump campaign claimed it raised the same month.

The Trump campaign and the Republican Party’s joint fundraising committee have now outraised the Biden campaign and the Democratic Party two months in a row. Major Republican donors that had been sitting on the sidelines earlier this year are now rallying behind Trump; small-dollar donors are fired up after the former president's conviction in his hush-money trial.

Full fundraising figures won’t be available until both sides’ joint fundraising committees file their quarterly reports next month, but Trump appears to have caught up on or is at least close to catching up on Biden’s cash on hand. The Trump campaign and the RNC are reporting a combined cash-on-hand of more than $172 million compared to the just under $157 million in cash-on-hand the Biden campaign reported.

The Biden campaign announced that their total cash-on-hand including joint fundraising committees is $212 million, but the Trump campaign has yet to voluntarily announce a comparative number -- which will be released next month.

Trump’s latest fundraising boost comes on the heels of his guilty verdict in his New York criminal trial, which was a major fundraising boon for Trump's campaign. The Trump campaign claimed that his team raised a massive $53 million from online fundraising in just 24 hours after he was found guilty of all 34 counts of falsifying business records.

Both the Trump campaign and the Biden campaign have been holding multiple ritzy high-dollar fundraisers with tickets going up to $840,000, Trump in particular kicking off his joint fundraising with the Republican Party in April with a Palm Beach fundraiser that raked in $50 million just in one night.

Despite the trial schedule that confined Trump into a Manhattan courtroom most days of the week earlier this year, Trump criss-crossed the country on days off the trial courting wealthy donors in Ohio, Kentucky, Texas, Florida and New York -- even attending a Manhattan fundraiser the day his guilty verdict dropped.

Trump ramped up fundraising even more once the trial ended, bringing in $27 million from a West Coast fundraising swing earlier this month, while Biden too raised more than $30 million from his star-studded Los Angeles fundraiser last weekend, joined by former President Barack Obama, Julia Roberts and George Clooney.

Both the campaigns also recently had dueling fundraisers in London with surrogates and former ambassadors, courting wealthy Americans abroad.

Meanwhile, pro-Trump super PAC Make America Great Again also outpaced pro-Biden super PAC Future Forward PAC last month, the pro-Trump group raising $68 million in May, including a whopping $50 million donation from major Trump ally Timothy Mellon. The pro-Biden group raised $39 million last month, including a $19 million donation from Michael Bloomberg.

Trump’s big hauls over the past couple of months reflect an influx of cash from previously untapped big Republican donors that had either turned away from Trump or had been sitting on the sidelines during the primary season. They finally returned to Trump after he became the party’s last-standing presidential candidate -- raising the question of whether Trump will be able to continue to expand his donor base.

Regardless, the cash flow has helped Trump gear up for the general election after coming out of the primary and is expected to boost the former president ahead of critical moments in the coming months including the upcoming first presidential debate in Atlanta as well as the Republican National Convention and the Democratic National Convention.

“We are moved by the outpouring of support for President Donald J. Trump," Trump Campaign senior advisers Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles wrote in a statement earlier this month when they announced the May fundraising figures. "The American people saw right through Crooked Joe Biden’s rigged trial, and sent Biden and Democrats a powerful message – the REAL verdict will come on November 5th."

The Biden campaign claims its battleground infrastructure is making up for the slower fundraising, saying Trump is doing little to expand his voter base in battleground states.

“For months, the Biden-Harris campaign has been on the ground talking to the voters who will decide this election, and Donald Trump’s been nowhere to be found,” Biden-Harris 2024 Battleground States Director Dan Kanninen wrote in a statement. “Now, with just over four months until the election, Donald Trump couldn’t match our battleground infrastructure if he tried. While Trump’s team is desperately trying to spin their lack of infrastructure as ‘strategic,’ the bottom line is that Donald Trump cannot buy back the time he has lost -- and invisible campaigns don’t win.”

“In an election sure to be decided by tens of thousands of voters, Team Trump is doing little to nothing to expand their base or court the battleground voters who will decide this election,” Kanninen continued.