Bloomberg: Trump thinks he doesn’t need to raise $1 Billion

Josh Marshall, TPM: Poor House Donald Strikes again

On both sides of the aisle, virtually every other campaign in the country gets swept along in the tide of spending coordinated between the presidential campaign and the candidate’s party: voter registration, mobilization, election day turnout, TV ad saturation. Most campaigns which aren’t in very safe districts or uncontested races rely heavily on that spending as a supplement to their own.

If it’s not there, or there in a dramatically reduced amount, that could have a big impact on congressional, gubernatorial and state legislative elections. Politico for instance says that Trump and the RNC may struggle to raise even $300 million.

What’s the problem? There seem to be three main issues. First is that Trump is starting very, very late. At this point in the cycle Romney had been raising big big dollars for months, with that billion dollar figure as the goal. If Trump got up to Romney’s clip today he’d still fall massively short. Second is that the donor class really, really doesn’t like Trump (temperamentally, ideologically, etc) and questions why they should open their wallets for another billionaire.

Here Trump probably wishes he could admit that he’s only worth a few hundred million. But whatever … For all sorts of reasons, the donors aren’t terribly inclined to give. And third, Trump doesn’t seem either eager to ask for the money or temperamentally capable of doing so.

In typical Trumpian fashion he resolves this by saying and probably believing that he doesn’t need the money in the first place.

That’s not how this works. The billion dollar figure isn’t whipped up out of whole cloth. And it’s not just for ads. Absent a GOP wave election, which seems all but unimaginable, this could hurt congressional Republicans quite a bit.