After last night, Donald Trump is the “presumptive” presidential nominee for the GOP. What that means is that the Republican party is now effectively operating under Pottery Barn rules: You broke it, you bought it, Trump supporters. Now it’s your job to get him elected. In theory, that shouldn’t be hard, because Trump supporters have been crowing about the record number of votes Trump’s accumulated in the primary. Trump and his supporters have been long been speculating about his sway with a “silent majority” that’s going to sweep him into office in November.
Suffice to say, that Trump’s argument for winning in November might be a tad over-simplified. Typically, money is the fuel that fires modern campaigns, and according to this metric, Trump is unlikely to be competitive. For one thing, fundraising is a responsibility that doesn’t look like it’s going to be widely shared by the entire GOP coalition. Aside from the Never Trump movement among grassroots voters, Trump’s polarizing path to victory has alienated a very necessary constituency in the party: big donors. At the Washington Examiner, David Drucker has done some preliminary reporting on financing a Trump campaign and things aren’t looking good:
For her part, Hillary Clinton has set an unprecedented fundraising goal of $2 billion and that seemingly absurd number may not be unrealistic. And without big donors, Trump will have to heavily rely on grassroots fundraising. Certainly Obama and Bernie Sanders have shown that can be a huge amount of money, but taken on its own it’s probably not enough to stay competitive. Trump’s hardcore supporters are certainly enthusiastic, so it’s not impossible to conceive of a scenario where Trump rakes in big money from small dollar donations.
On the other hand, a big part of Trump’s appeal was that he wasn’t aggressively fundraising, because he was supposedly wealthy enough to fund his own campaign. Why would his supporters give him their own hard earned dollars, if a big part of his appeal is that he’s a billionaire? At the same time, Trump has only given his campaign $36 million, and that’s loan that can be paid back with donations. If Trump is worth billions, why isn’t he giving more money to his campaign? Well, there’s a lot of evidence to suggest that Trump is grossly exaggerating his net worth, and doesn’t begin to have the kind of money to meaningfully self-fund a presidential campaign.
The national Republican party will have some resources to provide, but again, it’s also likely donations to the GOP directly will also wane given the opposition to Trump. Trump will likely continue to benefit from his skill in generating free media coverage, but in a general election that’s not be as beneficial as running ads with messages targeted to win over specific voter groups. It’s also a likely possibility that the tenor of Trump’s prodigious media coverage may turn more sharply negative now that he’s secured the nomination.
Finally, Trump’s campaign has made some serious strategic errors when it has tried to do things on the cheap. For instance, in February it was reported that Clinton was spending more on polling than six GOP candidates combined. By contrast, Trump refused to pay for campaign polling in Iowa and then accused Cruz of “cheating” in his victory in the state’s caucuses. The reality was that Cruz was the only Republican candidate who spent a significant sum on polling and used that data to very effectively target Iowa voters. It’s not just that Trump may not have the money needs to spend on basic campaign resources, it’s unclear whether he even knows how to utilize them.
Trump’s primary campaign has certainly proven many doubters wrong, and it’s been shockingly effective given how seat-of-the-pants it has been on an organizational level. But now he’s going to be up against a Clinton campaign stuffed with Google and Facebook engineers using cutting edge data gathering technology to craft messages swaying independents and telling the DNC exactly what doors to knock on to ensure a robust ground game in November. Expecting Trump to take a shoestring budget and fake it until he makes it in the general the same way he did in large primary field where huge swaths of his delegates could be had by earning 35 percent of the vote is not a strategy I would bank on.
Trump’s already way down in polls of head to head match-ups with Clinton. The Trump campaign better start reeling in a lot of money and fast, to say nothing of having an actual strategy for once. If Trump can’t fund something approximating real campaign, the presumptive nominee will quickly become the presumptive loser.
