Piece by piece…..
Donald Trump IS losing things….
I’ve posted about his Republican vote bein g ‘soft’…..
There are reports of a softness in Trump’s politiocal fundraising….
This at a time when the ex-President HAS personal civil judgements OVER a HALF BILLION DOLLARS…..
It’s hard to overstate how important retired, small-dollar donors like the Elliots are to Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign, and to the entire Republican Party.
Donations from those who describe their occupations as “retired” made up about one-third of all the money the Trump campaign raised for his 2020 reelection campaign, roughly $255 million, according to OpenSecrets data.
For these donors, Trump’s brand of apocalyptic, aggrieved and hyperpersonal fundraising has been particularly effective.
“Older folks are generally more vulnerable and they’re often more easily taken in” by aggressive political fundraising appeals, according to Saurav Ghosh, director of federal campaign finance reform at the nonprofit watchdog Campaign Legal Center. The group filed an ethics complaint with the Federal Election Commission against WinRed in 2022.
“You see with former President Trump, that he’s fundraising off his indictments. He’s fundraising off of Valentine’s Day. These are the type of emails someone who is elderly is getting,” he said.
Today, five years after WinRed was founded and quickly rose to become the dominant digital fundraising platform for Republican candidates, these same donors whose recurring monthly contributions fueled Trump’s last presidential campaign do not appear to be giving at the same rate, or in the same quantity.
WinRed, meanwhile, has been sued almost half a dozen times since its launch in 2019, with the lawsuits bringing into question aggressive fundraising tactics by Republicans, according to court records.
ActBlue and Democrats have faced some of the same criticisms, but their share of refunds has, at times, been far less than their Republican counterparts.
Trump’s political operation, along with the Republican Party, refunded just over 10% of every dollar it raised through WinRed during the 2020 presidential election, according to The New York Times. That refund rate was more than four times that of President Joe Biden’s campaign and surrounding political apparatus at that time, according to the Times
Drop in small dollar Trump donations
In 2019, Trump’s campaign committee collected $72 million in donations of $200 or less, according to OpenSecrets.
That amount represented a portion of the more than $378 million that was raised from around the time Trump filed to run for reelection in 2017 through Dec. 31, 2020, from small-dollar donors, according to the data. Much of that funding from small-dollar donors arrived in the election year 2020, with the campaign reeling in more than $264 million over the course of those 12 months from people who gave $200 or less to Trump.
But fast forward several years, and from November 2022 through the end of last year, Trump’s presidential campaign collected just $27 million in donations from those who gave $200 or less, according to the data.
That’s a difference of $45 million, and represents a 62.5% drop in small-dollar donations, from the year before the 2020 election, to the year before the 2024 election….