Trump trails Biden in money race as POTUS blitzes swing states: 'Democrats are reinvigorated'

09 March 2024

President Joe Biden's barnburner State of the Union (SOTU) speech appears to have calmed Democrats' fears about his viability as a candidate, and his party is about to make major investments in its ground game in several key battleground states.

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) is reporting that former President Donald Trump — while still enjoying a slight polling advantage in those states — is badly trailing Biden in fundraising as the general election season begins in earnest. According to the WSJ, Democrats are preparing to spend $30 million in a six-week ad campaign aimed at boosting Biden in states whose electoral votes are likely to decide the 2024 election, like Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Democrats are also opening 100 new field offices in those states in March alone, while hiring 350 new campaign staffers.

"Democrats are reinvigorated. My phone has been blowing up since last night and hasn’t stopped," Biden senior adviser Cristóbal Alex told the Journal.

The Washington Post reported that approximately 32 million people watched Biden's feisty SOTU address on Thursday, which is an audience 18% larger than last year's speech. Many of those viewers were inspired to donate to the president's reelection campaign, with the Journal reporting that the three hours following the address were the campaign's best individual fundraising hours to date.

Democrats continue to enjoy a significant cash advantage compared to their Republican counterparts. According to the Journal's calculations, Biden's campaign has more than $56 million in cash on hand, while Trump had just $30.5 million as of January 31. And campaign expenditures in swing states show an even larger disparity between the two parties. The WSJ reported that the Democratic National Committee (DNC) has transferred roughly five times as much money as the Republican National Committee (RNC) in the seven swing states most likely to decide the election.

Trump now no longer has to campaign for the Republican presidential nomination after former UN ambassador Nikki Haley suspended her campaign. However, he still has to contend with both the exceedingly high cost of running a 50-state national campaign operation while simultaneously paying lawyers to defend him in four upcoming criminal trials in three separate jurisdictions. This could mean that the RNC's coffers will be used as a legal fund for Trump to pay his lawyers — especially after his daughter-in-law Lara was just elected as co-chair of the RNC on Friday.

The ex-president's daughter-in-law running the national party has been met with both enthusiasm and trepidation by Republicans. After the unanimous vote to put Lara Trump at the helm of the RNC, several conservative influencers on X/Twitter with large followings announced their plans to stop donating to the RNC to prevent their money from being used to pay Trump's legal expenses.

Trump's money problems don't appear on track to abate anytime soon, as the ex-president just posted a $91 million bond to appeal the defamation judgment a jury ordered him to pay to writer E. Jean Carroll. He also has yet to post a bond in his planned appeal of the nine-figure judgment from the civil fraud case he lost to New York Attorney General Letitia James. When including penalties and statutory interest, Trump will have to post a bond close to half a billion dollars.

Even though Forbes estimates his personal net worth to be in excess of $2 billion, the ex-president has already been using his campaign infrastructure as a legal fund. In 2023, two of Trump's affiliated super PACs used approximately $55 million in donor funds to pay his attorneys. Trump campaign adviser Chris LaCivita said that the campaign's primary "mission" in 2024 was to "maximize the Republican Party’s resources to get President Trump elected."

Aside from its spending to elect Trump, the RNC also has to find ways to find efforts to regain control of the US Senate. Two of the costliest races are likely to be in deep-red states Trump easily carried in 2020, where popular incumbent Sens. Jon Tester (D-Montana) and Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) are both running for another six-year term. And the GOP's flimsy majority in the House of Representatives is just two net losses away from losing the speaker's gavel to House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-New York).

The 45th president of the United States recently met with X/Tesla/SpaceX owner Elon Musk — one of the world's richest men — as part of his ongoing hunt for campaign cash. Following their meeting, Musk tweeted that he is " not donating money to either candidate for US President."

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