President Donald Trump raised more than $30 million for his re-election in the first three months of 2019 and now sits atop more than $40 million, his campaign said on Sunday, the New York Times informs.
Trump’s campaign, which has set an ambitious $1 billion goal for the 2020 race, launched an aggressive fund-raising push earlier than his predecessors. The campaign has already installed a headquarters in Northern Virginia and is combining a push for both big donations and small contributions online.
Nearly 99 percent of the donations in the first quarter were for $200 or less, according to the campaign, with an average contribution of just over $34, the Times noted.
Democrats are concerned that Trump will spend the next year amassing a war chest as Democrats fight among themselves in a primary now featuring nearly 20 candidates. Trump’s $30 million haul is about the size of what Senators Bernie Sanders and Kamala Harris, the top two Democratic fund-raisers so far in the 2020 field, raised combined in the first quarter.
According to the Times, Trump enjoys both the traditional advantages of incumbency and almost total control of the Republican Party apparatus. His campaign and the national party have a combined $82 million cash on hand.
Trump launched his re-election drive almost as soon as he was inaugurated in 2017, and the early start has helped deliver a financial edge.
Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign, the last time a president sought re-election, held less than $2 million in the bank at this point in the election cycle.
Trump has spent heavily to advertise on platforms like Facebook and Google to lure in new small contributors. The Trump campaign and a joint fundraising committee with the Republican National Committee have spent nearly $11 million on Facebook ads alone since May 2018, according to the company’s ad database, running more than 190,000 different advertisements.
The full financial disclosures for the Trump campaign, and for all the Democrats running for president in 2020, are due to the Federal Election Commission on Monday, the Times noted.
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