US elections: Donald Trump’s campaign has spent 800 million dollars

A few months ago, the president of the United States, Donald Trump, had a massive and indisputable advantage over his electoral opponent, Joe Biden.

Money.

When Biden closed the Democratic presidential nomination in April, having spent most of his energy and money on a grueling primary race, Trump’s re-election campaign had nearly $ 200 million more in cash on hand.

The resource gap between the two campaigns seemed insurmountable.

It was the result of an enormously impressive fundraising effort by the president, which began years ago and has not stopped since.

In total, between the beginning of 2019 and the end of July this year, the Trump campaign and the Republican Party raised a staggering $ 1.1 billion.

Yet here is another staggering figure: $ 800 million. That is what the campaign has already spent, two months until election day.

Where did all the money go? We will get to that in a moment.

Meanwhile, Biden’s campaign is catching up.

Biden and the Democratic Party recently revealed that they had raised $ 364 million in August alone, beating the previous month-long fundraising record of $ 193 million, set by Barack Obama in 2008.

The Trump campaign has yet to report its own August figure, but the situation is worrying enough for the president who is considering investing $ 100 million of his own personal fortune into the campaign coffers, according to Bloomberg News.

The puzzling “evaporation” of Trump’s monetary advantage was the subject of a comprehensive investigation published by The New York Times this week.

Senior reporters Maggie Haberman and Shane Goldmacher interviewed dozens of current and former campaign workers and examined thousands of items in the archival documents.

“Some people within the campaign are forecasting what was previously unthinkable: a cash crisis with less than 60 days to go,” they wrote.

The report included plenty of examples of the extravagant spending the Trump campaign was involved in under the direction of its original manager, Brad Parscale, whom the president quite deliberately replaced in mid-July.

Here are some of the highlights.

The campaign paid $ 11 million to air television commercials during the Super Bowl, dwarfing in a single night the total amount it had spent on commercials in several critical states.

He spent more than a million dollars broadcasting ads in the Washington DC media market, where Trump resides and watches television, even though the US capital is overwhelmingly Democratic. Hillary Clinton won more than 90 percent of the vote there in 2016.

In total, more than $ 100 million was spent on pre-convention television spots for the two major parties, generally seen as marking the point where voters really start paying attention to elections.

About $ 800,000 was spent to power Parscale’s own social media posts, which included ads from the Trump campaign.

More than $ 30 million went to the manufacture of Trump products, such as his famous “Make America Great Again” hats.

The campaign incurred $ 21 million in legal costs, which covered Trump’s defense in impeachment and other investigations.

He spent $ 6 million on “souvenirs” for donors, like White House-themed M & Ms.

Yondr, a company that makes magnetic bags, raised more than $ 100,000. The bags were used during fundraisers to ensure that donors could not secretly record the president and then leak his comments to the media.

The campaign spent $ 325,000 reserving the Ritz-Carlton, near Jacksonville, for the Republican National Convention after Trump decided to move it from North Carolina to Florida. The event never happened there, due to the coronavirus, but the campaign is not getting its money back.

He spent US $ 156,000 organizing planes to put up aerial posters behind them.

And on some of the bigger expenses, he spent $ 145 million in costs related to sending direct mail to Americans, $ 40 million to acquire voters’ email addresses, and tens of millions on online advertising asking people who became donors.

The upshot of all this spending, which used up most of the campaign’s $ 1.1 billion war chest, is a race Trump appears to be losing.

The current average of RealClearPolitics polls has Biden leading the president at 7.1%. The numbers are tighter when looking at just the crucial states on the battlefield, with Biden leading by 3.2 percent, and after the last few years, I think we’re all treating the polls with a healthy degree of skepticism from anyway.

Yet Trump is trapped in a situation where those polls would have to be catastrophically wrong, worse than in 2016, for him to win. That doesn’t seem like a great return on investment.

“If you spend $ 800 million and are 10 points behind, I think you have to answer the question, ‘What was the game plan?'” Veteran Republican political strategist Ed Rollins told the Times.

“I think a lot of money was spent when voters weren’t paying attention.”

He went on to accuse Parscale of spending “like a drunken sailor.”

The newspaper also interviewed Parscale, giving him the opportunity to defend his decision-making. He said all of the spending occurred “under the supervision of the family,” referring to the Trumps.

“No decision was made without his approval,” he said.

Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, Ivanka’s husband, is extensively overseeing the campaign, despite his current and presumably busy role in the White House.

The man who replaced Parscale, current campaign manager Bill Stepien, has done something of a cost cut.

For example, it has drastically reduced the number of campaign staff who can travel to events, a practice that one anonymous official described as “sponsored vacations.”

And there has been a drastic reduction in ad spend, even in swing states.

To illustrate that point, during the last two weeks of August, the Biden campaign spent $ 36 million on television ads, compared to just $ 5 million for the Trump campaign.

The only thing that Trump’s operation still has over Biden’s is a formidable “ground game.” He says his volunteers knock on about a million doors every week. Democrats have largely stayed away from that traditional tactic during the pandemic.

This situation is not where nobody expected us to be.

Trump essentially began running for re-election as soon as he took office, in January 2017.

In the same week of its inauguration, it applied for a trademark in the initial slogan of its 2020 campaign, “Keep America Great.” To say it was a sign of things to come would be an understatement.

Since the 1970s, when the current framework of campaign finance laws was introduced, all other presidents (Reagan, Clinton, Obama, and both Bushes) waited until at least their third year in office before conducting a fundraiser. funds for reelection.

Trump held eight of them during his first year.

He began racking up resources for 2020 two years before any Democrats even announced they were running for president.

No monetization opportunity was wasted. For example, in 2018, the Trump campaign lured donors by promising that their names would be displayed during a live broadcast of Trump’s State of the Union address.

In other words, the president’s team was creative enough to turn the dullest, most boring, and most serious tradition of American politics into a source of income. And it worked: The campaign ended up raising a million dollars that night, with about 75,000 different donors.

“The Democrats will never catch up. It’s too much money,” political strategist Chris Lippincott told Politico last October.

“Let’s get the craziness out (of Trump) and he has an extremely professional operation,” warned Rufus Gifford, who presumably knew what he was talking about, given that he was the CFO of Barack Obama’s successful 2012 reelection campaign.

There are, of course, limits to what money can accomplish. Ask Michael Bloomberg, who spent more than a billion dollars campaigning for the Democratic nomination and didn’t win a single state.

Biden himself achieved an incredible revival to claim the nomination, despite the fact that almost everyone else spent much more in the primaries.

And it’s worth remembering that Trump actually spent much less than Hillary Clinton in 2016. She raised $ 1.2 billion for that campaign, compared to her $ 650 million.

However, money is one of the most important factors in any election. It enables campaigns to hire more people, buy more ads, and most importantly, focus their efforts on more states at once.

Without it, a presidential candidate is just running ads and building a participation machine in a handful of swing states. With it, they can expand the map and attack their opponent all over the place.

Donald Trump had the upper hand. Somehow, his campaign has managed to lose it.