Politico reports that Trump and the Republican National Coalition have raised more than $300 million, and the President alone has $158 million cash on hand to kick off his re-election bid, more than any other sitting president at this point in his campaign.
The numbers have Democrats worried, and at least one strategist told the Washington, D.C., based news outlet that, “[t]he resources he has will be put to work anywhere and everywhere that he feels like he can scare up electoral votes, and Democrats will never catch up. It’s just too much money.”
The Democratic presidential contenders, collectively, have outraised Trump, but as Democratic strategists point out, that money is going to cross-purposes. Each individual candidate is using their war chest to attack others, and there’s no guarantee that any candidate alone will be able to spark the same excitement alone as the field has, collectively.
Any Democrat that wants to compete with Trump will also have to raise the same amount of money — or more — in a much shorter period of time. If the nomination process goes down to the wire, the chosen Democratic nominee may have no more than a few months to knock out the sitting President, who is already running re-election ads in key states, a year ahead of the vote.
Trump is also, Politico reports, ahead of the game on donor identification. Since the re-election campaign began amassing in early 2019, it’s been running “an expensive, far-reaching effort to find new small-dollar donors,” and its working. In just the last fundraising quarter, Trump 2020 has identified more than 300,000 new donors for the cost of just $4.2 million.