Kamala Harris’s campaign raised more than four times as much as Donald Trump’s effort in August, capitalizing on the surge of Democratic enthusiasm during the first full month of her presidential campaign. But the super PACs aligned with Trump are continuing to raise large sums from high-dollar donors as the two candidates enter the final sprint before November.
Harris’s campaign raised $190 million in August, according to reports filed with the Federal Election Commission on Friday night, and she spent almost $174 million in August — ending the month with $235 million in cash on hand. The campaign spent more than $135 million on media buys and ad production; more than $6 million on air travel; about $4.9 million on payroll and related taxes; and $4.5 million on text messaging.
The Trump campaign’s report showed that he raised $43 million in August and spent $61 million, with $135million in cash to spend at the beginning of September. His campaign spent more than $47 million on advertisements, alongside $10.2 million on direct mail to potential voters and around $670,000 on air travel.
Let’s drill into Trump’s super PAC “strategy” for a minute:
America Pac, one of the largest and the most ambitious of the groups supporting Donald Trump’s campaign, is replacing its voter turnout operations in the crucial battleground states of Arizona and Nevada, according to two people familiar with the matter.
The political action committee, backed by billionaire Elon Musk, has ended its contract with the September Group and will hire a new company to knock on doors with fewer than 50 days left until the election.
I don’t disagree with the Harris campaign that the bulk of money spent to support Trump this cycle will come from super PACs, but hitching your campaign’s wagon to, for example, the vanity project of a ketamine-addled racist, leads to a predictably mediocre result: paid canvassers doing a shitty job, a deluge of poorly targeted mailers, and ads that may or may not carry the message that the campaign wants to send. That said, even Elon isn’t dumb enough to give directly to the Trump campaign, because the skim on that transaction probably approaches 100%.
Moving on, the $670K on air travel is a reflection of the anemic campaign Trump is running — Harris is spending almost 10X that amount. I just checked his events page and he has two public events scheduled next week in North Carolina and Pennsylvania. JD has five, and Tulsi Gabbard and Olivia Nuzzi’s sexting partner are co-hosting an event in Vegas. I can’t find a good events calendar for the Harris/Walz campaign, but it’s certainly more events, and more diverse events (like the recent Oprah appearance.)
One of the many unstudied mysteries of political campaigning is how much money is enough. It’s certainly true that early money is better money than money dumped into a campaign at the last second. I think we’ll all agree that money spent to support face-to-face efforts using volunteers is better than a firehose of ads. Whenever I see an ad from a PAC promising to support a Democrat, I sure hope that anyone donating to that PAC has already maxed out their direct donations to the campaign. And I certainly think that the fundraising we do here is gold standard. The rest is for Baby Jesus and your corner bookie to fight about.
Part of the reason Trump’s spending is so low is because they think they’re going to steal this election, so give early and give often to Democrats up and down the ballot, but only if you can afford it.
