Former President Donald J. Trump, riding a surge in financial support following his felony conviction, outraised President Biden in donations for the second straight month in May and has outraised his successor by about $81 million in contributions over the past two months.
According to both campaigns, Biden's joint campaign and the Democratic National Committee raised $85 million in May, compared with $141 million for Trump and the Republican National Committee. The Trump campaign also raised $25 million more than the Biden campaign in April.
The Biden campaign said it and the party had amassed $212 million through June. The Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee have not released their cash totals since the end of March. A partial tally released Thursday in Federal Election Commission filings showed Trump had amassed a war chest of at least $170 million with his party.
Overall, Trump was trailing Biden by $100 million in early April, but over the course of two months he has cut that deficit by at least half, and for the first time, Trump's major campaign committees have more money than Biden: $116.5 million to Biden's $91.6 million.
The details of each campaign's finances will be made public in federal filings next month, but a combination of Trump's improved fundraising and Biden's increased advertising spending this spring means the two campaigns are expected to be roughly evenly matched financially heading into the summer.
“Trump is certainly raising a lot of money right now and that should scare people,” said Brian Derrick, a strategist who founded the Democratic fundraising platform Oath, “but at the end of the day, Biden has the money he needs to run a very strong campaign.”
Trump closed the gap by attracting a flood of online donations after his May 30 conviction in New York. Donations flooded in within minutes of his conviction on 34 felony counts, briefly crashing WinRed, the Republican Party's online donation portal.
The Trump campaign said it raised $53 million online within 24 hours of the verdict and $70 million within 48 hours. The guilty verdict also sparked a wave of huge donations, with reclusive billionaire Timothy Mellon giving $50 million to a pro-Trump super PAC the day after the verdict.
At the end of the Republican primary, the Biden campaign and its allies argued that given all of the president's electoral weaknesses – persistent inflation, low approval ratings, persistent concerns about his age – cash offered one clear advantage.
Even though that advantage has since evaporated, the Biden campaign says it used its early financial advantage to build a political base in battleground states that will pay off in November. On Thursday, the campaign announced it had hired its 1,000th staffer across 200 offices in those states.
“What's in the Federal Election Commission report doesn't factor into tomorrow's campaign,” Dan Kanninen, Biden's battleground states director, said in an interview. “It's something that's built up over time and Donald Trump can't take it back.”
Trump communications director Steven Chang said Biden wasted money on ineffective TV ads.
“President Trump's record-breaking fundraising numbers prove that the American people are united in the fact that the unscrupulous Joe Biden's witch hunt against President Trump, skyrocketing inflation and illegal border incursions mean that four more years of Biden will mean the end of our country,” Chang said.
Money alone rarely determines the outcome of a major election like the presidential race, because voters are already well informed about the candidates, but some of the most important voters this year appear to be disengaged — and reaching them will require significant funding.
For months, Trump and his allies had no money to reach those voters, and while his path to the Republican nomination wasn't without its ups and downs, he left the primaries in a relatively anemic financial position compared with Biden's campaign, which had been building up funds for nearly a year.
Biden has rallied major donors within his party that Trump has not.
But that slow start gave Trump more room to grow. Weeks after he defeated his last Republican rival, Nikki Haley, Trump's fundraisers spoke of an almost covert effort to get him back in his good graces.
A mid-February fundraising dinner at Trump's Mar-a-Lago, Florida, estate, just weeks before Haley's resignation, marked a critical turning point for Trump campaign fundraisers signaling to wavering donors that the period of indecision was nearing an end. The dinner, hosted by hedge-fund billionaire John Paulson, raised $50 million, the campaign said. And in the last month alone, wealthy opponents like Blackstone co-founder Stephen A. Schwarzman have signaled their intention to support Trump.
Closing the nomination also allowed Trump to form joint fundraising committees with national and state Republicans, a seemingly technical step that could allow him to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars from individual donors all at once — a huge sum that Biden had been raising for months.
Online donations will become even more important going forward because the campaign can't solicit repeat donations from its biggest donors, and Trump's base seems so inspired by his causes: The campaign said a quarter of its donors in May were new.
The question for Trump is how many of those will become repeat donors. The Biden campaign has been aggressively cultivating repeat online donors, who raised $5.5 million in April and more in May, though the campaign has not released hard numbers.
So far, Biden enjoys an overwhelming advertising advantage over Trump.
From the start of the year through this month, Mr. Biden's campaign has aired or secured roughly $35.4 million in ads in the top six battleground states. Mr. Trump's campaign aired virtually nothing in those states and spent about $60,000, according to records kept by media tracking firm AdImpact.
Trump's advisers say the fact that Biden has spent tens of millions of dollars in key states without changing the trajectory of the campaign bodes poorly for his chances of winning the presidential election in November.
Biden fundraisers say they maintain an advantage when they factor in outside groups: Biden's coalition of super PACs and nonprofits has outspended Trump supporters by roughly 50% in the six most contested races, according to data from AdImpact.
Still, Biden's dominance of the airwaves is unlikely to last.
Trump's main super PAC, Make America Great Again, and its nonprofit arm, which can keep its donors secret, spent about $17 million on ads in Pennsylvania in the first half of the year, the only battleground state where it has made a big investment.
But this week, MAGA Inc. began securing about $30 million in airtime in Pennsylvania and Georgia starting in July as part of a $100 million summer advertising offensive. Other pro-Trump super PACs are also beginning to plan their own advertising offensives.
Biden's Democratic fundraisers expect Trump to eventually catch up, and said they received that instruction explicitly from the campaign's fundraising chief, Rufus Giffords, in a recent briefing. One Biden fundraiser likened the 2024 race to the summer of 2012, when Mitt Romney was steadily chipping away at President Obama's fundraising lead.
Other Democratic allies have been more surprised by recent developments, and speculate that the lasting political impact of convicting Trump would fall on donors rather than voters.
“It's nerve-wracking to see the money battle evened out,” said Democratic political strategist John Reinisch. “That was supposed to be one of Biden's real strengths. And he's been spending money for months, and we're not seeing much change in the polls. Hopefully that will change as we get closer to Election Day.”
For now, Biden is scrambling to replenish his coffers in June, hosting a $30 million event in Los Angeles with Obama and Hollywood stars and an $8 million backyard fundraiser on Tuesday at the home of former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, which was also attended by former President Bill Clinton.
Some are hoping Biden's surrogates will help with fundraising.
On the day of the first general election debate next week, three leading Democratic governors — Andy Beshear of Kentucky, J.B. Pritzker of Illinois and Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan — are scheduled to visit Los Angeles for a fundraiser.
At the same time, the Republican vice presidential candidates will host a debate viewing party in Atlanta as a fundraiser.
