July 2024:
Harris and her affiliates raised 310 million. Trump raised 139
August 2024:
Harris and her affiliates raised 361 million. Trump raised 130
https://www.axios.com/2024/08/21/harris-trump-fundraising-july-2024-election
I hope this translates into an edge for Harris. Clinton outraised Trump in 2016 but still lost.
https://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/trump-clinton-campaign-fundraising-totals-232400
A question from an interested non-American: what’s a typical breakdown of campaign costs for what is a billion-dollar-plus exercise?
Like, what percentage on polling, GOTV, ‘down ballot’ races, and other non-ad stuff?
What’s the perceived advantage of having oodles of cash to use, aside from ads?
I am interested to hear any factual answers to that question. My WAG is that it depends on when the money comes in?
Right now any on the ground GOTV infrastructure and campaign offices have already been built and in place or not. Sure they can run out of funds but the die is mostly cast there by now. Harris benefits from and is stuck with where Biden had invested. Or glomming on to local infrastructure they did not build. Paying for polling is likely a fairly fixed cost.
So at this point I would guess the biggest marginal spends are more ads.
In this specific case I am not sure but I believe the general principal of “better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it” certainly applies. I am sure there are other reasons as well.
Kinda seems you answered your own question.
More money does not necessarily equate to a win in November. It doesn’t hurt and is nice to have but not a guarantee either. Maybe with less money that side needs to be much more focused on spending smartly and that may help in a roundabout sorta way.
That’s generally true, but I wonder about this not because of how they might spend it, but as a proxy for how popular she is, and how likely people are to vote for her.
In addition to the massive fundraising advantage, we’ve had multiple reports of huge increases in voter registrations from demographics that largely favor Harris. but despite that, polling is still neck-and-neck. My inclination is to think that there’s something systematically wrong with the polling. How is she winning in both fundraising and pulling in new voters, but is still struggling in polling? Things just don’t add up for me.
Paying rent on campaign offices and wages of the people running them. Paying for the candidate and entourage (including press) to fly around lots of places, renting large spaces for rallies. The cost of TV advertising must rise through the roof at such times.
This year, both parties are incurring substantial legal fees. Mostly, the GOP is trying to restrict voting and the Dems are trying to enable it. But this is playing out through the courts.
(There are also a lot of new GOP efforts to prevent votes from being certified, which are also generating legal fees for both sides.)
Didn’t Clinton spend twice as much as Trump in 2016? The key is not spending money. It’s spending money wisely.
I hope not.
That it, is isn’t that Harris needs more ads, she needs better ads. I don’t mean she needs ads better than what she is running, but she needs better ads than Trump’s campaign runs. I am in a low-population deep red state, so I don’t seem many Harris ads, but I suspect in the battleground states they see more than enough. If they play the same ads over and over, the populace will hate them, and Harris by association. Not everybody needs to see every ad. They have more money, make the ads better and a wider variety.
Yeah, I am hearing echoes of 2016 in this. Let’s not fall for that again. We HAVE TO assume it’s as close as they come, and not let off the gas pedal.
Fully agree with this. The ads need to be finely tuned to the local area, and speak directly to voters there - speaking to their issues and struggles, and drawing direct contrast to the other team (there is so much material from TFG himself). Don’t assume everyone wants to hear the same message. With a massive war chest, they ought to be dialing-in the ads. I wont see any of them, being in a heavily blue state, but one can hope they spend the time and money on well-tuned ads in key markets.
I’m not taking my foot off of anything, part of why I’m wondering about this disconnect it worry that what we’re hearing is wrong in some way.
The funding is all public, so we can be confident that that at least is real, but I wonder what it really means. Are a lot of people donating, or is it just a few mega-donors? The latter might look like a groundswell of support, but that’s an illusion.
The voter registrations are harder to pin down: Are they just rumors, or are they real? Are people registering to vote, but without actually planning to vote, so they don’t get polled as “likely voters”? Or are the pollsters discounting these new voters because of an in-built bias wherein they just assume they’re unlikely voters based on past history, without considering the historic nature of Harris’ candidacy?
It’s a goddamned mess, is what I’m saying.
Don’t we have to factor in how much free advertising Trump got from the media in 2016? It was estimated to be about twice what Clinton received:
President Donald Trump‘s campaign cost almost $398 million, which was considerably lower than candidate Hillary Clinton‘s total of more than $768 million. But Trump was Trump, and thus a constant focus of media attention. According to mediaQuant, Inc., from July 2015 through October 2016 Trump received free media worth more than $5.9 billion. Clinton received less than half that figure, a little under $2.8 billion.
Back then every Trump rally was considered newsworthy. Today most are ignored and when they are covered the resulting news articles are almost always (except when he got shot) about how small the crowds are and what garbled nonsense he spewed.
Her warchest was almost twice as big but, as you noted, how you spend it is what matters. Hindsight being 20/20 I am not convinced she spent that money wisely. Clinton co-opted the DNC and I do not think the DNC was working diligently for anyone other than Clinton at the time.
I’m inclined to take this as just another encouraging data point. Raising a good deal more money than the RNC by itself does not determine that Harris wins the election. Nor does professor Alan Lichtman’s 13 keys determination that Harris will win guarantee anything. Similarly, surges in new voter registrations among key demographics favoring democrats by itself doesn’t make the outcome of the election a certainty. Poll aggregates showing Harris up today in most key battleground states don’t make the outcome in November a foregone conclusion either. Taken collectively, though, I see them all as signs for some optimism.
“It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” - Yogi Berra
I think it’s important to recognize that when we’re talking about campaign fundraising and spending, we’re talking about several different vehicles with different rules.
First, both candidates have official presidential campaign committees. These committees are limited by FEC rules in how much money they can accept from various sources: no more than $3,300 from an individual, $5,000 from a Political Action Committe (PAC), etc. All donors and the amount they donate must be disclosed. On the other hand, this is the funding over which the candidate has the greatest control. The campaign can direct and redirect these funds however they see fit (within some limits), and they can be used for things like hiring staff, renting office space, paying for rallies, advertising, etc.
Both candidates also have a primary SuperPAC associated with their candidacies. For Trump it’s Make America Great Again, Inc., and for Harris it’s Future Forward USA. SuperPACs can raise money in pretty much unlimited quantities. They are required to disclose donors who give $200 or more. The tradeoff is that, under FEC rules, the SuperPAC is not allowed to “coordinate” with the candidate’s campaign. Theoretically, the SuperPAC should be operating completely independently of the campaign. However, these two SuperPACs are completely staffed with long time loyalists of the candidates, and even if they’re not “coordinating” with the campaign, they’re completely familiar with the candidate’s campaigning strategy, priorities and style.
Those first two sources are what often get reported as the candidate’s campaign cash. But there are other source of funding that will be used to influence the election for/against the candidate. Mostly, there are a plethora of additional SuperPACs and PACs that spend money in support of or opposing each of the candidates. These are often associated with some specific interest group – abortion rights, oil and gas industry, etc. – or used by rich donors to bundle donations from their rich friends to support a candidate. And their donors often use opaque nonprofits designed to obscure the source of the contribution – i.e. dark money.
This later group is why reports of presidential campaign contributions and where they’re being spent are an incomplete picture. Even if Trumps’ official campaign and SuperPAC are behind in fundraising, there are still hundreds of millions of additional dollars that will be raised and spent to his benefit outside of these reported amounts. That does NOT mean that there isn’t a gap (Harris has her dark money too), but Trump will not be wanting for resources to support a strong campaign in all of the swing states.
And isn’t there money that cannot be spent on a candidate but on an issue that coincidently 
is associated with a race? Like certain money that I can’t use to explicitly say “Vote for Trump and the MAGAs” but I can say that “When you go to the polls remember the unborn that can’t vote for themselves and don’t want to be murdered by those that support pro-choice.”
I doubt fundraising makes much difference when Trump is as well-known as can possibly be and everyone’s already formed an opinion about him. The most it could do is GOTV, but again, this election is blared so constantly 24/7 on the news that everyone who wants to vote already is going to do so.
I agree there should be some optimism but there was a LOT of optimism in 2015 Clinton would win and we know how that turned out.