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Welcome to Thunderdome. The Republican Party has new leadership, with North Carolina GOP chairman Michael Whatley and daughter-in-law of the former president Lara Trump taking over an organization that will, in reality, be run by Chris LaCivita. They’ve already made one controversial but wise decision in demurring on the hiring of Scott Presler, a ballot harvester popular with the MAGA crowd. But they now confront the harsh reality of the RNC’s fundraising woes: they’re well behind the Joe Biden campaign and the DNC.
The Democratic president’s campaign account officially reported taking in $21 million in February, according to its report filed with the Federal Election Commission late Wednesday, ending the month with $71 million cash on hand.
That left the Biden campaign and the Democratic National Committee with a combined $97.5 million cash on hand as of the end of February, more than double the $44.8 million in the bank between Trump’s campaign and the Republican National Committee. Those totals don’t include either side’s joint fundraising committees.
Now, Republicans will argue that Trump got outspent by a lot in 2016 and won anyway, and that’s true. But it’s also the kind of black swan event that we can’t expect to repeat itself regularly in presidential politics — especially when the gap between campaigns is as wide as it is currently.
Going toe to toe in the difficult terrain of swing states will be a challenge for the GOP, and the lack of funds really translates to a need to focus. This is likely to frustrate state party chairs in the second tier of competitive states, where national money could translate to down-ballot wins. But the real need at this point for the RNC will be to hone in on the six or seven states likely to prove decisive in the contest.
Rebuilding the whole operation from the epic fail of the McDaniel era will be a project you can’t accomplish in the seven months before November. Better to save that task for the future, and spend what money you have in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Nevada, Arizona and the home state of both new RNC figures, North Carolina. At the moment, polling shows Trump is up in all seven. Keeping him there despite the dollar disadvantage is the challenge.
Listen to today’s Thunderdome podcast — mostly on this topic, but others as well — here!
Truth Social and Trump’s financial woes
So that’s the party and the campaign, but what about the candidate? He’s been trying desperately to fundraise for himself, seeking the billions necessary to challenge the New York verdict shepherded by Attorney General Letitia James, with visions of padlocking Trump Tower dancing in her head. Byron York outlines the effect this lawfare has had:
Democrats hope a guilty verdict in a criminal trial — any trial will do — will peel away voters who say they support Trump now but would not support him if he were a convicted felon. We’ll see.
But the lawfare campaign is already having another effect on Trump. It has put the former president under severe financial stress in two ways. The first is the tens of millions of dollars in legal fees Trump has already spent defending himself against the onslaught of criminal charges and lawsuits. The other is the crippling financial penalty, $454 million, in the lawsuit brought by the elected Democratic attorney general of New York, Letitia James.
It was an unprecedented lawsuit in which James created what former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy called “a fraud case in which there are no fraud victims.” Trump did not have the right to a jury trial, and a hostile judge came up with a devastating financial judgment.
Trump is now scrambling to find an insurer who will post a bond for the money so that Trump can proceed with an appeal of the verdict. If he can’t find an insurer to do that, New York law requires that Trump will either have to come up with the cash himself or sell some of his real estate holdings just to be able to mount an appeal. And all that is on top of an $83 million award in a separate sex-and-defamation suit, the one financed by the Democratic donor.
But given that Donald always seems to find a way to dodge, could there be a lottery ticket way out of this for Trump in the unlikeliest of forms — his social media enterprise, Truth Social? The WSJ reports:
Donald Trump’s supporters are pushing to hand him a nearly $3.5 billion windfall by driving up the value of his also-ran social-media platform, which is on the cusp of getting approval to list on the stock market.
Trump’s winning lottery ticket would come from Truth Social, the social-media platform he launched in 2021. After a twisted path that included tens of millions of dollars in losses and insider-trading convictions, the shell company taking Truth Social public became the market’s latest meme stock. Trump’s supporters banded together to push up the stock, valuing Truth Social to a staggering $6 billion.
Truth Social could go public as soon as next week, but the deal still needs to be approved by shareholders. Even if that happens, Trump must hold his shares for six months.
Truth Social was created by Trump when he was bounced from the major social-media platforms. Since the presidential candidate was reinstated by Facebook and X, formerly known as Twitter, Truth Social has instead become a potential huge paycheck.
Truth Social’s parent is set to go public by combining with a special-purpose acquisition company, or SPAC. Its shareholders, nearly all Trump supporters, are expected to approve the merger Friday morning. Trump’s company could replace the shell company in the stock market as soon as Monday. The new ticker would be DJT, Trump’s initials.
If the deal goes through, Trump’s $3.5 billion windfall could ease his financial pressure and boost his political campaign.
If the end result of meme stock mania is pushing a big bag of cash into Donald Trump’s hands, it would be particularly fitting, considering he is essentially a sentient meme stock himself.
Nevada is a warning sign for Biden
A key state, with a heavy Latino constituency, could tell the story of this campaign.
Republicans have made gains with Latino voters and people without college degrees — particularly significant voting blocs in the state. And economic trends look bleak for Biden:
Nevada has the nation’s highest unemployment rate — 5.3 percent. The state’s average gas prices are the nation’s third highest — $4.23 a gallon (behind only California and Washington state). Nevada home prices have jumped six times faster than wages since 2011, according to a recent study…
Senior Biden officials have told outside allies their internal data has the race much closer than last time — “basically a jump ball right now, with a lot of undecided voters,” said a person familiar with the Biden campaign’s thinking.
Former president Trump has been leading Biden in Nevada polls, including a three-point lead in an Emerson College survey out yesterday. A warning sign for Biden: That poll had a fellow Democrat, US senator Jacky Rosen, up by just two points over Sam Brown, the leading GOP candidate trying to unseat Rosen.
Trump both needs and hates early voting
It’s a repeated problem for the Republicans who need early and mail-in voting to be part of their attack plan in the fall — Trump keeps undermining every effort to do this whenever he’s asked about the process.
“Too Big to Rig.” That is the phrase Trump began unveiling in recent weeks, including in an appearance in Greensboro, North Carolina. His campaign also has printed signs with the slogan to hand out to supporters. The idea behind the pitch is this: Trump needs a lead so large that no one can take it away.
“We want a landslide,” Trump said at the rally. “We have to win so that it’s too big to rig.”
The line has garnered energetic applause from the Trump faithful, but it presents messaging challenges for Republicans. Even as the former president says the voting process could be rigged, he is urging GOP supporters to participate in it anyway. Trump also needs to woo moderate and swing voters, yet they could be turned off by his drumbeat of election-fraud claims…
Trump has paired his recent remarks with arguments that Republican-controlled states could better secure their elections right away by insisting on single-day, in-person voting, with identification checks. That position is at odds with intensive GOP efforts to encourage supporters to make use of early voting and mail-in ballots, methods that appeal to a growing portion of the electorate.
In the last presidential contest, Republicans fell far behind Democrats on those sorts of turnout initiatives, in large part because Trump derided alternative voting methods as ripe for fraud.
“If you have mail-in voting, you automatically have fraud,” Trump said last month in a town hall hosted by Fox News.
Before 2020, Democratic voters made slightly more use of mail-in ballots than Republicans, but the difference became far more pronounced in the last presidential election, with 60 percent of Democratic voters choosing to vote by mail while only 32 percent of Republicans did so, according to a 2021 report from the MIT Election Data and Science Lab.
While a “metric ton” of mail-in voting was driven by states’ response to the Covid-19 pandemic, Trump’s criticism of the practice “single-handedly drove a pretty radical shift in the mode by which the electorate chose to vote,” creating the sharp partisan divide, said Loyola Law School professor Justin Levitt.
One more thing
Could we be about to witness the return of the MAGA team from 2016? The people who were largely kept at a distance in 2020 are pushing to get back on the train, and they might just be successful this time. Axios reports Trump’s team is in talks to hire 2016 campaign advisors Paul Manafort and Corey Lewandowski, and the RNC just hired Christina Bobb as a senior counsel for “election integrity.” Now, they haven’t gone full crazy with the Laura Loomers of the world… yet. But the tendency is that whenever something starts going sideways, Trump likes to turn from professionals to those who flatter his assumptions the most. This bears watching…
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