Money race: Trump’s slow start, GOP self-funders, and Democrats’ Senate firewall

The first fundraising quarter of the campaign year is over, and a shrinking political map meant ever more money going to ever fewer races. Here are a few takeaways from the latest thick pile of campaign finance documents.

Donald Trump narrowed the cash gap, but didn’t close it. Trump didn’t chase Nikki Haley out of the presidential race until March 6, and the RNC replaced Ronna McDaniel two days later. The Trump 47 Committee, created on March 19, quickly raised more than $23 million, transferring $10 million to the RNC. Big donors quickly donated to the new Trump effort, and they helped solve the small donor problem that McDaniel was presiding over before she left.

Republicans have not caught up with the Biden Victory Fund, which had the whole quarter to raise money, and took in more than $121 million — $90 million of it in March. But the reporting deadline came before Trump’s biggest fundraiser, where his campaign claimed to have raised more than $50 million, as big donors who had hoped for another Republican nominee came with an apology in one hand and a checkbook in the other. The Biden operation entered April with $155 million of cash on hand; Trump’s entered it with $42 million.

Senate Democrats are still out-raising their challengers. The party’s very thin path to keeping the Senate is built by tremendous fundraisers. Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown and Nevada Sen. Jacky Rosen both set state fundraising records, with more than $12 million for Brown and more than $5 million for Rosen. Montana Sen. Jon Tester, who raised less than $6 million to win his seat in 2006, raised $8 million in three months. The only Democrat who was out-raised, Wisconsin Sen. Tammy Baldwin, raised five times as much from individual donors as businessman Eric Hovde; he loaned his own campaign $8 million.

Democrats had an advantage in open seats, too. Arizona Rep. Ruben Gallego raised $7.5 million to Republican Kari Lake’s $4.1 million; Lake, so far, is the strongest fundraiser of the GOP’s 2024 Senate recruits. Former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan raised more than $1.9 million after announcing his Senate run on Feb. 9, more than any Republican has raised to seek that office in Maryland since Michael Steele — their last competitive candidate, 18 years ago. Hogan was still outraised by Prince George’s County Executive Angela Alsobrooks, with $2.1 million, who was helped by Democratic senators who’ve endorsed her. Hogan did outraise Rep. David Trone, but the Total Wine founder isn’t counting on small donors, who gave him a bit less than $220,000. He’s loaned his campaign nearly $42 million so far – four times what megadonor Ken Griffin has given a super PAC designed to help Hogan.

If you want to join Congress, be rich. The personal wealth of the GOP’s frontline Senate candidates has already defined those races. In Montana, Ohio, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, Democrats are portraying each likely opponent as an out-of-touch Gordon Gekko who doesn’t truly understand the place where he’s running.

Sure enough, the GOP’s recruits in those races put in a ton of capital to start up their campaigns. Ohio’s Bernie Moreno and Pennsylvania’s Dave McCormick, who both ran unsuccessfully last cycle, have put $4.5 million and nearly $2 million into their 2024 campaigns; last time, they loaned their own campaigns $3.9 million and $14.4 million, respectively. (Moreno bailed out before the 2022 primary, while McCormick has no serious primary challenge this year.)

They were not alone. Sixty-six Republicans running for the House had the personal resources to loan at least $100,000 to their campaigns, along with 14 Democrats. Most were not running to flip swing seats. The largest self-donation of the year so far came from North Carolina’s Kelly Daughtry, who’s competing in North Carolina’s 13th Congressional District, newly gerrymandered by the GOP legislature to be safely Republican. She leant her campaign $4.3 million, which helped her win the first round of the primary; she faces a runoff against Trump-endorsed prosecutor Brad Knott, who loaned himself only $530,000.

Kevin McCarthy was a fundraising dynamo. Mike Johnson isn’t, yet. When House Republicans threw their speaker overboard last year, some worried that the best fundraiser in their history was being replaced by a little-known conservative who had never had to collect much money.

This quarter’s numbers aren’t likely to quell those fears. Johnson hasn’t recreated McCarthy’s machine, though he’s built a smaller, bespoke one in a hurry. Johnson’s Grow the Majority, the fundraising committee he created after winning the gavel, raised $9.1 million through the quarter. That’s around a third of what Protect the House 2024 PAC, McCarthy’s old committee, raised in the first three months of 2023, fresh from the party’s narrow midterm victory. As Rob Pyers first noted, Johnson’s already spread much of that among front-line members.

The unwillingly liberated McCarthy has been doling out money to hurt some of the House Republicans who ousted him. Just one of them got out-raised by individual donors: South Carolina Rep. Nancy Mace. She collected $206,337 in the first full quarter under Speaker Johnson, about half as much as Catherine Templeton, who filed to challenge her on Feb. 5. Templeton got help from California Rep. John Duarte, and from 2022 Mace challenger Katherine Arrington. But the other seven Republicans who vacated the chair last year outraised their opponents, and Arizona Rep. Eli Crane, the only freshman in the group, raised more than $1.1 million.

Don’t raise general election funds unless you’re pretty sure you’ll win the nomination. The single biggest expense by the defunct presidential campaign of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was donor refunds. It sent back $6,476,803 to individual donors, and $11,400 to PACs; the refunds for individuals ranged from $10 for canceled automatic payments, to $6,600 to maxed-out donors who’d given to both the DeSantis primary campaign and a stillborn general election campaign. DeSantis told donors last week that he was ready to help Trump, who he endorsed as soon as his own campaign ended, raise money for the fall. He knows where to start with that.

• In The New York Times, Rebecca Davis O’Brien reports on the “major Republican donors” who came rushing back to Trump in March, including Robert Mercer and Joe Ricketts.
• At CNN, David Wright, Fredreka Schouten, Alex Leeds Matthews and Matt Holt find a Democratic edge in House swing seats. Democrats out-raised Republicans in 20 of the 22 seats rated as “toss-ups” by the Cook Political Report.