'We don’t treat donors well': GOP fundraisers warn 'threatening' emails are fueling money woes

01 April 2024

Countless polls released in March showed a very close race between Democratic incumbent President Joe Biden and 2024 GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump, with Trump slightly ahead in many of them. Veteran Democratic strategist James Carville, during a late March appearance on MSNBC, observed that "the polling" had "gotten a little bit better" for Biden but warned that Democrats are "not going to replicate the 2020 coalition."

One area where Biden has an advantage over Trump, however, is fundraising.

In an article published on April 1, Washington Post reporters Josh Dawsey, Michael Scherer and Clara Ence Morse stress that Trump and the Republican National Committee (RNC) continue to suffer from lackluster fundraising compared to Biden and other Democrats.

"In 2020, Trump and his fundraising committees raised a record $626.6 million from small-dollar donors, 35 percent more than Biden took in from that group," the reporters explain. "But last year, Trump raised just $51 million from small donors, way down from the $119 million he registered in 2019 and only 18 percent more than Biden's total. His small-dollar haul — which includes donations of $200 or less — was not nearly enough to offset Biden's lead among major donors."

Dawsey, Scherer and Morse add, "The Republican National Committee also raised much less money from small-dollar donors in 2023 than it had in 2019, contributing to budget problems for the party. Officials at the National Republican Senatorial Committee were shocked by the low returns on their investment in the strategy ahead of the last midterm elections."

According to the journalists, the Post discussed the GOP's fundraising woes with "more than two dozen people across the Trump campaign, Republican fundraising committees and private firms."

GOP fundraiser John Hall told the Post, "The biggest problem in GOP fundraising is that we don't treat donors well. Sending eight e-mails and texts a day that promise an artificial match, threaten to take away your GOP membership, or call you a traitor if you don't donate doesn't build a long-term relationship with donors."

Zac Moffat, CEO of the digital political agency Targeted Victory, argues that political fundraising has become increasingly competitive.

Moffat told the Post, "It's easy to blame texts and e-mails, but people don't want to state the obvious: There's far more competition in the space. As more races come on board, more people are competing. It used to be 50 people trying to talk to them; now, it's 150, even if the donors have grown 25 percent."

Read the Washington Post's full report at this link (subscription required).

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