Matt Margolis of PJMedia.com argues that the former president and 2024 Republican frontrunner has a good reason for concern about a top rival.
Trump may have an edge in primary polling, but even he can’t deny that Ron DeSantis is a force to be reckoned with when it comes to fundraising.
On Thursday, DeSantis’s first quarter fundraising numbers were released, showing that he has raised a whopping $20 million since launching his campaign on May 24. Nearly half of that came in the first 24 hours.
The DeSantis campaign shared its fundraising data with Fox News, touting the fact that this haul was the “largest first-quarter filing from any non-incumbent Republican candidate in more than a decade,” and that it even “bests the $18.3 million former president and quasi-incumbent Donald Trump’s campaign raised during his first two fundraising quarters as a candidate ($3.8 in Q4 2022 and $14.5 in Q1 2023).”
Fox News notes that “The Trump campaign and its allied fundraising committees brought in $9.5 million from the former president’s mid-November launch through the end of last year and nearly $19 million during the January-March first quarter of fundraising.” President Trump reported this week his campaign and Save America PAC’ had “together brought in over $35 million between April and June in the second quarter of political fundraising,”
“We are grateful for the investment so many Americans have made to get this country back on track. The fight to save it will be long and challenging, but we have built an operation to share the governor’s message and mobilize the millions of people who support it. We are ready to win,” DeSantis campaign manager Generra Peck said.
The pro-DeSantis Super PAC Never Back Down also raised huge money. According to CEO Chris Jankowski, DeSantis’s campaign and Never Back Down collectively raised $150 million, with donations from every state, which indicates, according to Jankowski, “what a formidable movement is behind Governor DeSantis. The future of the Republican Party is Governor Ron DeSantis.”
