President Donald Trump and his Republican allies are loaded with cash.
In 2019 alone, Trump, the Republican National Committee (RNC) and two joint fundraising committees brought in a mindboggling $463 million. In the last three months of the year, they pulled in $154 million together, money they say came as a backlash to impeachment.
Of the $154 million, some $72 million was brought in by the RNC, which hauled large checks from wealthy donors, according to The Washington Post. Another $46 million was raised by Trump’s re-election campaign and the rest was brought in by the two joint fundraising committees. Together, Trump and the RNC will head into the 2020 election with nearly $200 million of cash on hand, a “war chest” that will be far greater than what Democrats can muster.
“President Trump’s unwavering commitment to keeping his promises to the American people has propelled us to break fundraising records again this quarter,” RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel said in a statement. “Democrats’ baseless impeachment charade has only made support for President Trump stronger.”
The news of the RNC-Trump combination comes after Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and other top Democrats revealed their own Q4 fundraising from 2019.
Sanders led the pack by raising $34.5 million. His fundraising, combined with some of the top Democrats in the 2020 field — former Vice President Joe Biden ($22.7 million), Sen. Elizabeth Warren ($21.2 million), Pete Buttigieg ($24.7 million), entrepreneur Andrew Yang ($16.5 million), Sen. Amy Klobuchar ($11.4 million), and Rep. Tulsi Gabbard ($3.4 million) — comes out to about $135.4 million in total. But even that is short of the $154 million the RNC and Trump brought in together.
.@realDonaldTrump & @GOP have built an unstoppable juggernaut & it keeps getting bigger and stronger.
— Brad Parscale (@parscale) January 3, 2020
STAGGERING fundraising of $154 MILLION in Q4 for Trump, RNC & joint committees.
Total: $463M in 2019.
All-important cash-on-hand almost $200M.
Baller.https://t.co/F4sohFU70G
Some political pundits have predicted that former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who is running his own campaign for president, will write a check to even the scales in 2020 — as he has said he “spend whatever it takes to defeat Donald Trump.” But for now, Trump and his allies are vastly outraising top Democrats and will have more money on hand heading into 2020, which is one of the only metrics that matter when it comes to political spending.
A spokesperson for the Democratic National Committee (DNC) told The Washington Post that it isn’t trying to outraise the RNC, but instead is trying to drum up support for the field of Democratic candidates.
“We’re seeing unprecedented enthusiasm for the Democratic Party, with half the Democratic field alone having already outraised the sitting incumbent president by tens of millions of dollars,” DNC spokesman Daniel Wessel said. “The DNC made smart investments that led us to victories in 2017, 2018 and 2019, and is hard at work building the infrastructure necessary to do the same in 2020.”