Donald Trump remains predictably confident about his purported chances in the 2024 presidential election, but fundraising totals for the close of last year, which followed the ex-president formally confirming he would be seeking to regain the presidency, show his campaign’s hauls dropping.
He actually raised more in the month and a half before he formally confirmed his campaign than in the month and a half that followed. (He announced on November 15.) According to the numbers reported in NBC, Trump’s total from what was apparently November 15 to December 31 was $9.5 million — and his total from October 1 up to what would presumably be shortly before his launch was $11.8 million. Those numbers don’t exactly sound reassuring for Trump, who is not a lock for the GOP nod. His campaign ahead of 2024 has started slowly, with stops in New Hampshire and South Carolina — states holding high-profile primaries early in the process — only recently. Neither of those events were big-budget Trump rallies. Instead, the gatherings were on a much smaller scale. The New Hampshire speech was to a party meeting, and his South Carolina stop was before a crowd of just hundreds.
Trump is also facing what could eventually be a credible challenge in the primary from Florida GOP Governor Ron DeSantis. The governor hasn’t announced a campaign, but talk of the recently re-elected official potentially doing so continues, with polling on key fronts — like New Hampshire — showing DeSantis doing well. A new edition of the Granite State Poll conducted by the University of New Hampshire showed the governor ahead of Trump by 12 percent among likely voters in the state in Republicans’ upcoming race for the nomination. Trump and DeSantis have also been trading rhetorical barbs. Amid his recent campaign swing, Trump criticized the governor for the so-called disloyalty of his potential presidential run and for supposedly leading what was actually a restrictive response to COVID-19. (In reality, DeSantis was among those responsible for some of the most lax approaches.) DeSantis has also criticized Trump’s conciliatory approach to Russian leader Vladimir Putin.
Meanwhile, the Trump campaign has hired a firm called Campaign Inbox to work on its small-dollar fundraising operation, per NBC. Almost all the money Trump raised after he confirmed he was running was from individuals providing $200 or less in support. Quite simply, there’s still a long way to go in the 2024 race for the presidency. The recent decision at Meta (what the company behind Facebook is now called) to let Trump back on Facebook could significantly help with his fundraising operation, considering the well-established precedent of political candidates including Trump spending big on the site.