A pair of seismic events in May and June unleashed gushers of money into the presidential fund-raising race — and that was before an assassination attempt on former President Donald J. Trump.
New campaign-finance filings released this week revealed how much Mr. Trump’s conviction on 34 felony counts on May 30 and Mr. Biden’s disastrous debate performance on June 27 became seminal moments for both Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden’s campaigns. Just how much the attempted assassination on July 13 transformed the money battle will not be known until sometime next month, when additional filings will be made public.
Mr. Trump entered July in a better financial position than Mr. Biden — and Republicans were able to gain that upper hand largely because of Mr. Trump’s felony conviction.
Mr. Trump has supercharged the Republican National Committee since he became the party’s presumptive nominee in the spring. The R.N.C., which had as little as $9 million in cash on hand at end of January, ended June with $102 million in its coffers, nearly double the $54 million it had at the end of May.
The committee’s cash increase is primarily a downstream effect of an enormous spike in small-dollar fund-raising after Mr. Trump’s conviction, according to filings from campaign committees and data released earlier this week from the Republican fund-raising processing firm WinRed. Mr. Trump and allied Republican groups raised roughly $69 million from May 30 — the day of his conviction — to May 31. The $34.5 million or so raised on each of those days more than doubled the record for the best online fund-raising day of the entire campaign by either party.
Mr. Biden also saw some large fund-raising hauls after Mr. Trump’s conviction, though not nearly at Mr. Trump’s level. Mr. Biden raised a total of $19.2 million with allied Democratic groups in the two days after the conviction, according to the Democratic fund-raising platform ActBlue.
But his best fund-raising days of the race so far came — perhaps surprisingly — after his unsteady debate performance at the end of June. Mr. Biden and his committees raised roughly $28 million over a two-day period between June 27, when the debate took place, and June 28.
While Democrats also received strong fund-raising contributions after Mr. Trump was convicted, the same was not true for Republicans after Mr. Biden’s debate performance. The G.O.P. raised about $11.9 million from June 27 to June 28, only slightly higher than a typical fund-raising day, according to WinRed.
The Trump and Biden campaigns previously had self-reported their combined fund-raising hauls and joint cash-on-hand totals, figures that included money raised by their allied party committees. But neither the Biden nor the Trump team had shared how much of that money was raised or held by the campaigns themselves until Saturday evening.
Mr. Biden and the Democrats out-raised Mr. Trump and the Republicans in June, $127 million to $112 million, according to figures reported by the campaigns. But Republicans overall had about $45 million more on hand at that point than Democrats did, the campaigns have said.
On Saturday, fresh filings with the Federal Election Commission showed that the Trump campaign itself had $128 million on hand as of June 30, while the Biden campaign had only about $96 million.
The Republican National Committee’s momentum continued into June, when it raised $67 million, more than double the amount it had raised in any other month in the 2024 cycle. That was most likely a delayed effect of Mr. Trump’s conviction at the end of the May. The Democratic National Committee, meanwhile, raised only $39.2 million during June, and had only $78 million on hand.
The Trump campaign gained the lead also thanks to a big gap in spending levels. In June, the Biden campaign spent almost six times as much as the Trump campaign did: roughly $59 million compared with about $10 million. The Biden campaign has been aggressively investing in television advertising — it dropped $48 million on media in June — while the Trump campaign has largely ceded the airwaves.
The presidential race has, of course, been transformed since the figures were finalized on June 30. The first three weeks of July walloped the Biden campaign in the fund-raising sector, as calls grew for Mr. Biden to end his re-election bid. And the attempted assassination on Mr. Trump on July 13 almost certainly propelled historic small-dollar fund-raising, though the campaign has not released updated figures.
The independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. raised just $5.4 million in June — about half of that, $2.5 million, from his running mate, Nicole Shanahan, The New York Times previously reported.
Mr. Kennedy’s campaign had about $5.5 million on hand at the end of June and carried over $3 million in debt into July. But Mr. Kennedy, to dig himself out of the cash crunch, struck a novel deal with the Libertarian National Committee late last week. Even though he is not the Libertarian presidential nominee, he can now raise larger checks in conjunction with the party’s committee, just as Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden can with their parties’ committees.
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