While Trump’s “self-funding” pitch was clearly effective in the primary (throughout the months-long campaign, person after person at Trump rallies would rattle off Trump’s contention that he wasn’t beholden to special interests as one of his most appealing aspects), it has left him far behind Hillary Clinton and her allies. Clinton, through April, had pulled in $187.5 million and had more than $30 million in the bank. That money is already being put to work in the form of a multi-million dollar ad blitz in battleground states — an effort, advisers say, to define Trump to the general electorate before Trump has an opportunity to defend himself — a strategy that mimics what President Barack Obama’s campaign successfully deployed against Romney in the early summer months of 2012.
Even Trump’s first major foray into fundraising — ten events in nine days where he raised more than $8 million, according to one source— has been questioned as not good enough. Major donors who live in the cities where Trump is scheduled to stop say they have not even been contacted about the events. Invitations have been distributed with few local names listed as hosts. And Republican fundraisers have expressed alarm that his pace is not nearly grueling enough to close the massive financial deficit he will face, which is likely to exceed $500 million.
“At this stage, I think you got to be doing like ten events in two days,” said Spencer Zwick, one of the Republican Party’s most celebrated fundraisers, when told of Trump’s schedule. “You’ve got to go around and scoop the money up.”…
His low-dollar operation is not set to launch until the convention. Some Republicans who have raised money for every previous presidential campaign say they have not received a single contact from Trump’s team. And even those who are paraded by the RNC as top financiers tell CNN that they haven’t made a single call to their networks for the Trump Victory Fund.
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