Trump’s Campaign Is Short on Cash. Its Solution Could Cost Him the Election.

Trump’s persistent cash flow problem has been an issue at least since Joe Biden dropped out of the race in July. As soon as Harris took his place, she began raising eye-popping amounts of money that Trump has never been able to match. Crucially, most of this money came in the form of direct donations, the backbone of any campaign, much of it from small-dollar donors. In the third quarter of the year, her campaign and its affiliated groups raised about $1 billion in contributions, while Trump raised less than half of that with $417 million. Harris outraised Trump by a 3-to-1 margin in September alone, and she entered October with vastly more cash on hand than her opponent.

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The former president appears to believe that a small number of billionaires can make up for this shortfall. This handful of plutocrats, and the corporations they own, are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to get Trump back in the White House. But there’s a problem: They cannot actually contribute anywhere near that much to his campaign or its joint fundraising committees. So, instead, they give the money to super PACs—committees that can raise and spend unlimited sums in support of a candidate, which were unleashed by the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United v. FEC. In Citizens United, the conservative majority struck down restrictions on “independent” corporate spending to influence an election, condemning these limits as a violation of the First Amendment. Its ruling gave rise to super PACs by allowing billionaires to create and spend unlimited amounts of money promoting a candidate (and attacking his opponent).

Citizens United reasoned that this spending would not corrupt politicians because it was “not coordinated with a candidate,” but undertaken apart from the campaign. Since then, however, the Federal Election Commission has steadily weakened federal rules against super PACs “coordinating” with campaigns directly. Most recently, the commission allowed super PACs to coordinate with campaigns to plan and implement canvassing operations. The Trump campaign has seized on that decision to outsource much of its door-knocking work to super PACs—including to Elon Musk’s America PAC. Musk has plowed $75 million into America PAC already and positioned it as, in effect, the canvassing arm of the Trump campaign. The Republican National Committee and GOP state parties have pulled back from get-out-the-vote operations, ceding much of the work to super PACs.

It is reportedly not going as planned. Traditional campaigns rely on paid staff to put together a small army of volunteers, who use various records, like voter registration, to identify and contact potential supporters. Pro-Trump super PACs, by contrast, are simply paying people to knock on doors, usually between $20 to $40 an hour. Musk has rolled out a glitchy app that’s supposed to steer canvassers toward “low propensity voters” who may lean toward Trump. As the Washington Post reported, however, the app struggles in “rural areas with low connectivity,” precisely where many of these Trump voters live. Reuters has reported that canvassers have fallen well short of their goals, persistently missing their assigned targets in swing states. A Guardian report identified rampant fraud in the operation, with as many as a quarter of alleged “door knocks” in two states marked as fakes. As the Guardian pointed out, though, the vendors paid to coordinate canvassing have a disincentive to sniff out fake door knocks, because they themselves get paid “by the door.” If they discover that their canvassers falsely inflated their numbers, they may owe money back, giving them good reason to look the other way instead. (America PAC has already fired two vendors.)

Republican advisers reportedly warned Musk that he could not put together an effective get-out-the-vote operation so soon before the election, pointing out that hiring and training effective canvassers took more time than he had. Musk ignored them, and now Trump’s ground operations are in serious distress. The absence of guidance and leadership from the campaign has also left state and local Republican parties infighting over their own small-scale efforts to get voters to the polls.

There is only one precedent for outsourcing voter mobilization to a super PAC: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ doomed primary campaign. Strapped for cash, DeSantis turned over canvassing to the Never Back Down PAC, which encountered many of the same problems that Musk’s America PAC faces today. (This coordination was not legal at the time, but the Federal Election Commission ignored it.) DeSantis’ primary campaign flopped, probably in part because so many key operations were farmed out to the super PAC. Curiously, though, two former DeSantis aides who helped run the governor’s doomed campaign are now steering America PAC for Musk.

R&I – Obey