Since their selections as the two big parties’ vice presidential nominees, Tim Kaine, D-Va., has raised millions more for his own campaign than Mike Pence, R-Ind., has for his.
Kaine, who was technically nominated later, was credited by the Clinton campaign with raising at least $27 million.
Pence, meanwhile, has raised about $10 million for the Trump Victory Fund, helped raise $6 million with GOP nominee Donald Trump at a joint event and helped bring in some large checks to super PACs, reported Politico Sunday.
The two will face off in the campaign’s only vice presidential debate Tuesday night at Longwood University in Farmville, Va. Both candidates are bringing in significant amounts of money to their campaigns. However, Kaine clearly has a financial leg up on Pence.
In some ways, that was to be expected given the two candidates’ backgrounds.
Kaine is a former Democratic National Committee chairman and a reasonably popular, moderately liberal senator from Virginia, a state with a few of the richest counties in the entire United States.
Pence is former head of the conservative House Republican Study Committee and the governor of a reasonably Republican Midwestern state who might have had a hard time winning reelection had he not been tapped to run for Vice President.
Yet Politico suggests that there is an additional impediment to Pence raising as much money for Trump as Kaine does for Clinton.
Clinton’s campaign is a natural fit for the party’s donor base. Trump’s campaign is not a typical Republican and not a natural fit for the party’s donor base.
Though Pence is a conventional conservative Republican, his running mate is anything but. Pence reportedly has to spend a great deal of his time hand holding and damping down donor concerns about Trump, making his task all the more difficult.
