Trump Is Behind Harris on Fundraising. Will It Matter?

Julia Press and Saleha Mohsin
·15-min read

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With two months until election day, Kamala Harris’ campaign is outpacing Donald Trump’s on fundraising. But this late into the race, how much does money matter?

Big Take DC host Saleha Mohsin sits down with Bloomberg money and politics editor Laura Davison to break down both campaigns’ finances, how they might spend their money, and how much impact cash could actually have in the race.

Listen and follow The Big Take DC on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Here is a lightly edited transcript of the conversation:

Saleha Mohsin: It's the final two months of the 2024 US presidential race, and that means candidates are pushing hard to fill their campaign coffers for the crucial and expensive push.

Kamala Harris: There is too much at stake, so let's not fall short on our resources.

Donald Trump: If you can afford we have to win this, we're going to take back our country we're going to make America great again.

Mohsin: In early August, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris’ campaigns released fundraising numbers. One of them had a clear lead.

Laura Davison: Harris has about $377 million in the bank. Trump has about $327 million.

Mohsin: Laura Davison covers money and politics for Bloomberg News.

Davison: In the first 11 days of Harris' campaign, basically from the day that Biden dropped out till the end of July, she attracted more unique donors than Biden did during the entirety of his run, which was basically, over a year.

Mohsin: And Laura said there’s even more good news for Harris if you take a closer look. The Trump campaign released its August numbers this week… and it spent $32 million more than it earned. But Harris?

Davison: Over the past kind of six weeks that she's been in the race, she's been raising about twice as much money as Trump. So she's bringing it in a lot faster, while both campaigns are spending at about the same rate.

Mohsin: That sort of influx in money is often a sign of momentum… which is key in the final sprint of campaign season.

But with Election Day around the corner… does the money itself make a difference?

Today on the show, Laura and I break down this pivotal money moment. We look at how the campaigns’ bank accounts stack up, how they might spend their money… and how much impact it could actually have at this point in the race.

Davison: Two months! [clap] Two months of spending. Let's go.

Mohsin: From Bloomberg’s Washington bureau, this is the Big Take DC podcast. I’m Saleha Mohsin.

Winning a presidential election isn’t cheap. But in recent years, every campaign cycle has set a new record on spending. A lot of that spending is done by outside groups.

But I wanted to understand why money matters when it comes to the campaigns themselves. So I asked Laura, how do campaigns spend their money?

Davison: There’s basically three big buckets where the money goes. One is staff. There are campaign headquarters staff, but also field staff in all the swing states, helping organize volunteers, doing get out the vote effort, all those sorts of things.

The second bucket is canvassing. So these are people who go door to door to get people to turn out to vote. So these are not necessarily people who are, like, full time campaign staff. These are other people who work sort of on a contract, temporary basis, and then you, of course, you need people to help organize them, give them the literature, give them the training, to do that sort of on-the-ground effort.

Mohsin: Those first two buckets make up what’s known as a campaign’s ground game. And Laura told me, the two teams have taken very different approaches to this.

Davison: The Biden campaign, which is now the Harris campaign, has been very diligent on, you know, getting field operations up and running.

So they have, um, offices across all of the, the major seven swing states. They've hired a bunch of staff. They have, you know, different spokespeople for each of those states. So they, you know, are very much concentrated on having people on the ground.

The Trump campaign has sort of really taken an opposite approach. That is not really worth the time and money. They knew going into this race that they were going to probably raise less money than the Democrats were. So they were looking at, you know, what are ways that we can cut costs.

Having all these offices, having all the staff is very expensive. So they said, look, this is not something we see as being as much of a priority for us.

Mohsin: In the last few weeks, since Harris took over the Democratic ticket, the Trump campaign seems to be rethinking its strategy.

Lara Trump, who’s co-chair of the Republican National Committee and Donald Trump’s daughter-in-law, acknowledged this in an interview on Bloomberg TV last week:

Lara Trump - BTV: Well, listen, of course, you have a different candidate. You do have to change your tactic to an extent… and we're looking at all the same polling as well. And we're making sure that where we need to kind of firm things up, we're going to allocate a little bit more money there. We're going to put more boots on the ground in those areas.

Davison: They have done a couple things, more as, um, um, symbolic gestures. So they've, like, opened up an office in downtown Philadelphia, for example, a, a place that they're really trying to recruit Black men to help support Trump's candidacy.

Mohsin: When it comes to those first two buckets, staff and canvassing, it takes time for money to translate—to go from sitting in a bank account, to getting someone to cast a ballot. Money might give you the funds to pay staff… but you have to hire them and train them, and then get them into the field before they can be effective.

That puts more emphasis — and more pressure — on the third campaign spending bucket. One that can have a much faster impact: Advertising.

Davison: And this is a huge expenditure. You know, the campaigns are spending millions of dollars a week, both on broadcast, but also increasingly so on digital advertising, social media advertising, and also what we call connected TV. That's like all the streaming services, all the advertisements that go there.

Mohsin: Everyone always says you have to spend money to make money, so how much does it cost to actually create and then distribute an ad?

Davison: The expensive part is not the making of the ad. It is the, the distribution of it.

In Michigan, for example, you could buy a 30 second local spot, non primetime for, you know, a couple hundred dollars, like $600. But, you just want to blanket the airwaves, um, so that you're reaching all the people.

Mohsin: That single $600 ad spot can quickly balloon when you’re airing it on multiple networks, in multiple cities… during multiple viewing times.

And Laura says that for primetime ad slots… we’re talking tens of thousands of dollars.

Davison: So, you're basically wanting to spend as much as you can, one, so that people hear your candidate's name, but also, so that your competitor can't buy those spots.

It is not out of the question that in a couple weeks, as we really get into the thick of the campaign, that, a lot of the regular advertisers for TV, you know, car dealerships, personal injury lawyers, furniture stores are not going to be able to buy ad spots because there's just so much political advertising flooding the waves.

Mohsin: Wow. Just blitzed.

Davison: Totally blitzed.

Mohsin: In the past week, Trump’s campaign spent nearly $2 million to air a thirty-second ad spot in North Carolina alone. It was an attack ad, criticizing Harris on the economy… and it aired almost 4,000 times across the state.

Michael Franz: At this point, the campaigns are going to be spending all of this money to try to win that two or three or four percent of the electorate that might swing a little bit back and forth.

Mohsin: That’s Michael Franz, co-director of the Wesleyan Media Project, which tracks political ad trends.

Franz: That sounds like not a big percentage. But, if the Harris campaign said, ‘Oh gosh, like I'm not gonna spend all that money for three percent,’ then they'd lose. So it becomes the difference between winning the White House and losing the White House whether you win those three or four percent then it makes sense why you might spend $300 million dollars.

Mohsin: Since Harris took over the Democratic ticket, Michael says, her campaign seems to have shifted its advertising strategy from that of Biden.

Franz: Since Biden dropped out, Harris spent like $130 million dollars on ads, which is a lot of money. She has also spent, this is somewhat surprised us, a lot of money, $70 or so million dollars in the last month, on Facebook and Google based advertisements.

Trump has always been known as the sort of digital type candidate. He ran for president in 2016 by tweeting. He didn't spend a lot of money on TV ads. It seemed like he was running this rogue campaign. In 2024, he's actually spending most of his money on ads on the TV side.

Mohsin: Michael says, these strategy shifts could indicate that Harris is focused on targeting younger voters, through digital platforms. And that Trump is targeting older voters in battleground states—on TV stations with a fixed number of ad spots.

Franz: And so if you were watching TV in a battleground state like Pennsylvania or something or in Atlanta, you might actually see more Trump ads than Harris ads.

Mohsin: So that’s campaign money. How it’s spent and where you’ll see the impacts.

But how does outside spending help—and sometimes hurt—a candidate? And how critical are the last few weeks leading up to the election across both types of spending? That’s coming up…

When it comes to the presidential election, the biggest money isn’t coming from the campaigns themselves. It’s from outside groups—known as PACs and super PACs.

Davison: So, a PAC, a political action committee, these are groups that are organized by the party or organized by, um, a specific company and basically they can raise money to then give to different candidates.

But the real moneymaker, and the big money raiser in campaigns are super PACs. They don't have any sort of contribution limit. So people can give hundreds of millions of dollars to these groups if they want to.

The key differential from a PAC or from a campaign is that the super PACs can't coordinate with the candidates. They can't actually call up the campaign manager and say, ‘Hey, like, where do you want us to spend this money?’ Of course, there's all sorts of ways to get around this, campaigns can come out and say, ‘Hey, look, wouldn't it be great if someone started spending a bunch of money for us in North Carolina?’ But they aren't supposed to legally actually call up the phone and talk with one another.

Mohsin: Outside groups have already poured about half a billion dollars into the 2024 presidential race. Campaigns can rely on PACs to run ads… but these groups also need more money to buy those ads.

Davison: Campaigns can buy the advertising at basically the lowest rate available.

Mohsin: TV stations are required to give candidates the best price for an ad spot in that particular market and time slot.

Davison: If a super PAC is to go out and buy that exact same spot, they're paying somewhere between three and five times as much for that. So, while they can raise a lot more money, because there's no contribution limits, they're getting a lot less bang for their buck than the campaign is when they go out and spend that same money.

Mohsin: During a primetime college football game in Atlanta last week, it cost the Harris campaign an estimated $3100 to air a thirty-second ad spot.

But for a pro-Trump super PAC to air an ad during a college football game in Atlanta… it cost around $14,000. And that’s just one TV station.

These prices are only going to get higher as we get closer to election day.

All this raises the question: When campaigns put out an ad asking voters to donate… is that ad worth it? Michael Franz, at the Wesleyan Media Center, says that you have to think about the long game.

Franz: You might be spending a dollar to raise two dollars, but then there's a longer term return for those investments because when you contribute, you're obviously giving the campaign your name. They're going to ask for your email and now they've got your contact information. And so they can email you for free later to get more money.

And so it might be the case that, you know, a $5 million ad buy online returns $6 or $7 million in contributions, which doesn't seem like a lot of money above and beyond the purchase cost of the ads, but you've also got this contact list that you can then go back to and raise more money from.

Mohsin: The thing is, though, that it's, September, 50, 60 days from the vote. Haven't most people made up their minds? Like, why is now a time for these candidates to keep pushing ads out?

Davison: Most people have made up their minds, but most people won't be deciding the election.

It'll be, you know, 10 or 20,000 people in some of these key swing states, those persuadable voters. The other reason why, particularly if you live in a swing state, you're really going to start to see the advertising ramp up now is because a lot of people aren't paying attention to the presidential election.

Labor Day is seen as the time that, like, people really start tuning in. Now is really crunch time.

Mohsin: So when it comes to the fundraising gap between Harris and Trump… how much of a role could it play in swing states in the next two months?

Davison: So the gap will matter in that the Harris campaign will probably have more leeway to buy whatever advertising they want, add whatever staff they need, hire whatever canvassers, and just have a little bit more flexibility. You know, money can't buy happiness, it can't buy an election, but it can solve a lot of problems.

When it comes to Trump, his campaign may not have quite the flexibility that the Harris campaign does. But he has a lot of support from outside groups.

Mohsin: Groups like Elon Musk’s super PAC have been pouring money into critical states like North Carolina.

And once the next president takes office… there will still be another looming question.

Mohsin: Do donors who give big money get to shape policy positions?

Davison: Sort of the, uh, you know, history school answer should be no, that these things are very separate. But the answer is that yes, we do see people who are big donors, you know, end up in key roles in administrations or, having some sway, you know, having access to whoever becomes president.

Kind of the key example is that, you know, someone who's a key donor, um, gets a really plumb ambassador post, I mean, getting to be the ambassador to France and getting to have sort of a more ceremonial role that's just sort of a fun job. But like in the Trump campaign, for example, you see, um, Howard Lutnick, with Cantor Fitzgerald, he's been a major fundraiser, he's hosted many events for Trump, he's given, um, a lot of money. He is now the head of Trump's transition team. He's helping to shape policy. So even before, you know, the election is decided, key donors are already getting slotted into roles that could really help, um, you know, determine the shape of an administration.

Mohsin: With Harris and Trump facing off for their first debate next week, we can expect to see a big fundraising push from both campaigns. And Laura says, it’s not just how much money they raise. We should be paying attention to how these campaigns talk about the money that’s coming in.

Davison: These numbers and how they talk about them sort of tells you where the, the energy is. When Harris first got into the race, her campaign was coming out every couple days saying, ‘Look, we've raised this many more million dollars and it came from this many givers,’ signaling there, ‘Look, we have a lot of small dollar donors. This shows the energy behind us.’

When the campaign doesn't talk about that, that's when you can tell that it's more from large dollar donors. That small dollar donor number can really be an indicator of how much enthusiasm there is behind a candidate.

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