Despite suspending payments to staffers, former Texas Gov. Rick Perry is continuing to play down the severity of his presidential campaign’s financial woes.
Hours before arriving at the Iowa State Fair Wednesday, the two-time Republican presidential candidate joined Fox News’ “Fox & Friends” to talk about Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton and the three-prong immigration plan outlined by Donald Trump over the weekend.
Before launching into those topics, host Elisabeth Hasselbeck asked Perry to address the onslaught of rumors that he’ll be the first candidate to drop out of the 2016 race because his campaign has become so strapped for cash.
“Certainly the canceling out part is not true,” Perry said. “Everybody in life’s had some money problems from time to time … and whether it’s in your campaign, your small business, your personal life or being the governor of the 12th largest economy in the world, you’ve got to make some cuts and have a smaller footprint.”
Perry told CNN Tuesday that he currently has “a lot of young people that are volunteering for us” and will continue to operate on a small budget for an indeterminate period of time. According to the Washington Post, the former governor has limited his campaign expenditures to covering travel costs for him and one or two of his aides.
“If the person with the most money could win the presidency — if that is all that’s required — I’m pretty sure Donald Trump would write a check and it’d be done,” Perry told Fox News.
For the time being, the three-term governor said his campaign will continue its “steady diet” of visits to early primary states and hopes to raise some hard cash with a strong performance in the next Republican debate on Sept. 16.
According to Federal Election Commission records, two super PACs supporting Perry’s White House bid had a combined $11.8 million cash on hand upon submitting their mid-year filings on July 31. Austin Barbour, head of the pro-Perry Opportunity and Freedom PAC, recently told the Washington Examiner that his group plans to ramp up its efforts on the ground to ensure Perry remains in the race.
“Just because it doesn’t say in the typical super PAC playbook that you don’t do that, doesn’t mean that you can’t,” Barbour said at the time.
Perry is currently one of the bottom four candidates in the GOP field with 1.3 percent support among Republican voters, according to RealClearPolitics’ polling average. At this point in the 2012 presidential campaign, Perry was less than two percentage points behind the eventual Republican nominee, Mitt Romney.
