Ben Carson’s campaign team said Thursday that they doubled their fundraising figures each month during the third quarter.
According to senior adviser Mike Murray and communications director Doug Watts, Carson raked in roughly $3 million in July, $6 million in August and $12 million in September, including $2.5 million after his Sept. 20 comments about not advocating for a Muslim president.
The news is major boon to a campaign suddenly in the top tier of the GOP race alongside fellow outsider Donald Trump. In all, the former neurosurgeon and political outsider has raised over $30 million for his campaign.
“It’s not showing any signs of slowing down,” Murray told the Washington Examiner Thursday. Watts echoed that sentiment, arguing they are in good hands moving forward and already expect a strong showing in October and (looking even further down the road) in the fourth quarter on the fundraising front.
“I don’t know if we can keep up the doubling of the previous month, but we’re going to have a pretty sustained effort and I think we’ll have a very good quarter next quarter,” Watts told the Examiner. He also pointed to Carson’s Facebook page as a major contributor to their fundraising success, having recently passed 4 million fans after starting with only 200,000 fans earlier in the calender year, as well as emulating President Barack Obama’s fundraising efforts during his successful 2008 and 2012 campaigns.
“It’s using all the channels available for a public outreach campaign, meaning social media … as well as other traditional fundraising methods, and we use them in a creative, integrative fashion,” Watts said, adding that Bernie Sanders’ campaign is doing much of the same. “Lots of other campaigns, I think, don’t apply the same kind of thinking, particularly Republican campaigns.”
While Carson’s team beat the other campaigns to the punch by announcing their third quarter numbers early, they are still wary of Trump’s presence given that he is, as he tells everyone, self-funding his campaign.
“Self-funders are a different animal than everything,” Watts admitted. “But even self-funders start to look at the bottom line every once in a while and, because they are self-funding, they micromanage expenses. There’s one sole keeper to the budget, and that’s the funder. It’s not just an easy, open-access bank account. It’s still something to be reckoned with.”
“But we’re going to be fine. We have major donor efforts really kicking in now,” Watts said. “[W]e expect that our fundraising, it’s ahead of our plans that we laid out at the beginning of the campaign. Not just in dollar terms, but in having the platform to raise money from.”
“We’re going to have all the money we’re going to need to do whatever we want to do through to the convention,” Watts added.
Carson is currently ranked third in the Examiner‘s latest power rankings, and polls second according to the latest RealClearPolitics national and Iowa polling averages.
