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For any Republican presidential candidate not named Donald Trump, holding the first primary debate on August 23 in Milwaukee is an essential obstacle to overcome. It provides the first, and for many candidates perhaps the only, opportunity to make their voice heard on the national stage.
It remains to be seen whether Trump will appear in the debate, which will air on Fox News, but many of the candidates are getting creative and stretching campaign finance law to make the cut.
The Republican National Committee established minimum viability requirements that many candidates have trouble meeting.
I spoke with CNN national political writer Fredreka Schouten about what’s happening, whether it’s legal and what else she’s learned about Trump and the other candidates. campaign finance reports and personal financial disclosures that tell the real story.
WOLF: You write about the creative ways Republicans are trying to reach 40,000 donors. What are they doing?
SCOUTS: What are they not doing?!
Some of the lesser-known candidates have tried really unorthodox ways to meet part of the requirement to make the Republican debate stage in August: that they must raise money from at least 40,000 unique donors (including at least 200 contributors in 20 states and territories).
In what appears to be the most generous offer yet: A super PAC backing Miami Mayor Francis Suarez’s bid for the GOP nomination is offering what it calls “Francis Free College Tuition” — seeking $1 contributions that would go to the candidate’s campaign to enter a drawing that would give the winner up to $15,000 for a year of college tuition.
One of the more unusual tactics seems to have already paid off. North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, a former software CEO who is funding his own presidential campaign, has offered $20 gift cards to 50,000 donors in exchange for a contribution of at least $1.
Burgum announced this week on CNN’s “Inside Politics” that he had reached the donor threshold.
Meanwhile, former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson recently picked up on an idea first floated by another Republican presidential candidate, businessman Vivek Ramaswamy, and has decided to offer fundraising groups a cut of the money they help raise on his behalf.
WOLF: This is basically paying someone for a political contribution. How can this be legal? And is there a precedent for this sort of thing?
SCOUTS: The strategy has raised many questions. Burgum’s campaign, for example, insists it has made the traps work and that its approach is legally sound.
Two campaign finance experts I interviewed say otherwise, arguing that reimbursing a donor with a gift card could be construed as a violation of federal law that prohibits straw donations — the practice of donating money on someone else’s behalf. It is not a universal opinion, however.
And frankly, many candidates are in little danger of getting into real trouble with regulators.
Someone could file a complaint with the Federal Election Commission, arguing that the scheme violates the law. But the FEC, which is evenly split between Democrats and Republicans, often struggles to agree on enforcement actions.
WOLF: Do we have a firm idea of who has qualified for the first debate at this point? And has Trump pledged to participate?
SCOUTS: In fact, we still don’t know who has qualified.
Several Republicans, from Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie to Ramaswamy, say they have reached the donor threshold.
But there are additional hurdles: Candidates must reach at least 1 percent in three national polls, or at least two national polls and two separate early voting state polls. So the voting picture is still coming into focus. Stay tuned.
The former president, who is leading the current polls, certainly seems unwilling to join the debate next month, but also says he has not made up his mind. “When you have a big lead, you don’t,” Trump said of the debate during an interview with Fox News earlier this week.
WOLF: We are learning a lot from fundraising reports. I was surprised, for example, to see in your story that Christie made more contributions in the recent fundraising period than former Vice President Mike Pence. Which candidates are happy right now and which are freaking out?
SCOUTS: Pence, who raised about $1.2 million in the second quarter, is certainly running for a former vice president. But that’s perhaps not surprising, considering the elder Trump, his former boss-turned-nemesis, is looming over the hardest-hitting Republican base.
New GOP entrants like Hutchinson and former Rep. Will Hurd still appear to have a long way to go to secure the money to sustain their campaigns, or even make the debate stage next month in Wisconsin.
We’ve focused a little on DeSantis’ image. He is second only to Trump in the polls and has raised an enviable $20 million in the quarter. But about $3 million is general election money that can’t be spent for primary school. And he has spent money quickly, burning through about 40% of his total, in the first six weeks or so of entering the race.
Over the weekend, the campaign confirmed to CNN that it has cut some staff after Politico reported that “fewer than 10 staffers” had been cut in event planning.
(Our colleague Steve Contorno has a great story on the state of the DeSantis campaign and whether there really is a major shift in strategy afoot.)
WOLF: You’ve also written about the nearly $1 billion that Trump and his wife Melania declared in recent financial disclosures that they generated as income since leaving the White House. How is Trump making money these days?
SCOUTS: The former president has business interests that span the globe, from golf courses to licensing deals. That hasn’t changed.
What I personally found interesting about the recent disclosure was how lucrative some of their speaking engagements have been.
Trump earned $2.5 million to provide celebrity commentary at a pay-per-view boxing match, for example. Meanwhile, Melania Trump was paid $155,000 to give a speech in 2021 to a pro-Trump super PAC, which was not clearly disclosed in the super PAC’s filings at the time.
WOLF: CNN reported last week that some Democrats are nervous about how seriously President Joe Biden is taking his re-election campaign. What does the fundraising data suggest?
SCOUTS: Biden’s fundraising, when combined with the Democratic National Committee, is about $72 million for the quarter, according to his campaign announcement. That’s a respectable amount, though off the pace set by President Barack Obama and the DNC at this point in Obama’s re-election.
The filings, however, show Biden spent very little money, which is sure to deepen anxiety among some Democrats about his preparation for re-election. He had, for example, only four staffers on the campaign payroll as of June 30. (DeSantis, on the other hand, had about 90 people on his campaign team.)
Possibly allaying Democrats’ concerns: As a sitting president, the DNC can act in support of his re-election, so the party’s staff and resources benefit Biden. And there’s still a field full of Republicans who must fight each other in the coming months for the right to face Biden next fall.
WOLF: Finally, how does CNN report on this data? I am regularly impressed by the detail that you and our colleagues like David Wright go into these reports. What are the big features of how you do it and what are the new challenges of this election?
SCOUTS: With a lot of coffee and little sleep.
Well, more seriously, we have a plan each presentation day about the stories to follow. David is often looking for reports that are due and pulling the top line numbers that help show the big picture, while I might dig a little further into individual documents.
We have to be very sensitive to any breaking news we see in the reports and will often write individual stories about interesting developments. A day later, we typically publish a broad takeaway story to give our audience a sense of all the major headlines in the presidential and congressional races.
And then we’ll keep digging a little more.
Fortunately, a colleague from the CNN data visualization team, Alex Leeds Matthews, has joined us to do more data analysis. His numbers crunch prompted an interesting chart released earlier this week detailing how much the Trump campaign has benefited financially from his legal troubles this year.
One of the challenges of this election is just the sheer number of Republican presidential candidates — and their aligned super PACs that we’ll follow — along with the growing use of so-called “dark money” — or undisclosed money — going into campaigns on both sides of the political aisle.
Every election cycle, candidates and their allies find some new way to raise and spend money, and we have to find new ways to track it.
David adds this important note that sums up why it’s worth the sleepless nights: “Politics is full of twists and turns and reliable data can be hard to come by, but the money – who has it, who doesn’t and how it’s spent – often tells the story.”
