Trump Campaign Raises $210 Million in August, Trailing Biden

President Donald Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign and the Republican National Committee announced Wednesday that they jointly raised $210 million in August, trailing the record haul their Democratic counterparts brought in during the same time period.

While Trump’s August fundraising is a record for his campaign, it is far less than the $365.4 million Joe Biden and the Democratic National Committee raised last month.

The Trump campaign said it was using the money for a “muscular field operation” that will turn out voters and countered that Biden was spending primarily on advertising.

“We like our strategy better,” said Trump’s campaign manager Bill Stepien.

Trump is trailing Biden in national polls and has lost ground for his handling of the coronavirus and of the accompanying economic downturn. The president has discussed putting as much as $100 million into his campaign. Though Trump personally contributed $66 million to his 2016 campaign, it would be unprecedented for an incumbent president to put his own money toward winning a second term.

“If I have to, I would,” Trump said Tuesday of putting money into his campaign. “But we don’t have to,” he told reporters as he departed Joint Base Andrews outside Washington for a speech in Florida.

The campaign did not release cash on hand figures for the re-election effort, which has spent more than $820 million, Federal Election Commission filings show. Trump’s cash advantage, which stood at more than $150 million over Biden at the end of April, has disappeared. At the end of July, Trump and the RNC reported having more than $300 million in their coffers compared to $294 million for Biden and Democrats.

Both campaigns have been flooded with donations. Though Trump’s August receipts fall short of Biden’s, they still eclipse the previous monthly record for fundraising and the $193 million that Barack Obama raised in September 2008.

The campaign said that August was the largest online fundraising month ever for the campaign, which has about 2,000 field staffers around the country. Stepien added that “the Trump campaign will have all the resources we need to spread the message of President Trump’s incredible record of achievement, on the ground and on the air, and define Joe Biden as a tool of the radical left,”

The campaign said it raised $76 million during the four days of the Republican National Convention last month. Since January 2019, Trump and the RNC have raised more than $1.2 billion for the 2020 election. Biden has raised $787 million since he started fundraising with the DNC in April.

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