WASHINGTON ― President Joe Biden’s reelection effort pulled in more than $90 million in March, his campaign announced Saturday, giving him nearly $200 million in the bank heading into April.
The figures were released the same day that the presumptive Republican nominee, coup-attempting former President Donald Trump, is holding his first major fundraiser of the general election season in Palm Beach, Florida, with donations as high as $814,600. A Republican close to the campaign predicted the event would take in close to $50 million.
Trump’s campaign and the Republican National Committee earlier this week announced that they had raised $65.6 million in March and had $93.1 million in cash available heading into April.
Up to this point, Biden has already been able to accept large checks because he already had a joint fundraising agreement with the Democratic National Committee. Because Trump was competing against other candidates for the nomination, the RNC did not have a similar agreement with Trump, so he had been limited to receiving no more than $6,600 from each donor.
The official reports for the Biden and Trump campaigns, their respective parties and their joint fundraising committees are not due to be filed with the Federal Election Commission until later this month.
The Biden campaign boasted that its first-quarter fundraising total ― $187 million ― gives it the best financial start of any Democratic presidential candidate in history.
The total includes $25 million from a New York City fundraiser last week that featured Biden as well as former Democratic Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, as well as $10 million the campaign said it raised in the 24 hours following Biden’s State of the Union address.
The Biden campaign also said that it is rapidly growing its small-dollar fundraising base and its email list doubled from the end of December to the end of March, with small donations ($200 and less) coming in at $1.5 million a day last month.
Small-dollar donations had been a strength that Trump, who had a loyal following as the host of the reality competition show “The Apprentice,” brought to the Republican Party when he won the 2016 nomination. In 2020, Trump and the RNC together raised more than $500 million in small donations before Election Day and then $250 million more after Trump began lying about the election having been “stolen” from him.
Trump has continued raising millions each month from that same pool of donors with the money going to his Save America “leadership” PAC, which he has effectively used as a slush fund to pay his legal bills, and his fundraising totals have shown signs that his followers were getting exhausted by the endless emails and text messages.
Trump recently created the “Trump National Committee,” a joint small-dollar fundraising entity, that sends 90 cents of each dollar to his campaign and the rest to the Republican National Committee.
The high-dollar joint committee, named “Trump 47,” puts Trump’s personal committee second in line for the money, right after Trump’s campaign. Only after donors have given the legal maximum to both does the RNC see its first penny.
Trump a month ago locked up the GOP nomination despite facing four separate criminal prosecutions. Two are based on his actions leading up to and on Jan. 6, 2021, when a mob of his followers attacked the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to reinstall him as president.
One of the federal criminal cases, on conspiracy and obstruction charges related to the 2020 election, could go to trial as early as late summer, depending on the timing of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling on his claim that he is immune from prosecution. A Georgia state prosecution based on his attempt to overturn his election loss in that state could also start later this year.
A New York state prosecution on charges that he falsified business records to hide hush money payments in the days before the 2016 election is set to begin jury selection on April 15, while a second federal prosecution based on his refusal to turn over secret documents he took with him from the White House to his South Florida country club has not yet been set for trial.
In a separate civil case, a New York jury last year found that Trump had sexually penetrated writer E. Jean Carroll against her will in an incident at a department store in the 1990s, declaring him liable for sexual abuse. The jury also found he had defamed Carroll in remarks disparaging her account. The federal judge in the case later clarified that Trump’s actions were rape in the “common modern parlance.”