Former President Donald J. Trump outraised President Biden for the second month in a row in May, surpassing his successor by an estimated $81 million in donations over the past two months as he received financial support after his impeachment.
In May, Mr. Biden’s campaign and its joint operation with the Democratic National Committee raised $85 million, compared to $141 million for Mr. Trump and the Republican National Committee, according to the two campaigns. In April, Trump’s team also brought in $25 million more than Biden’s team.
Biden’s campaign said it entered June with $212 million combined with the party. The Trump campaign and the RNC have not released the full amount since late March. A partial count on Friday, revealed in Federal Election Commission filings, shows that Mr. Trump has amassed a war chest of at least $170 million with the party.
Overall, Mr. Trump was a staggering $100 million behind Mr. Biden at the start of April. In two months, he cut the cash deficit by at least half.
A full accounting of both parties’ finances will be made public in federal filings next month. But the combination of Mr. Trump’s improved fundraising and Mr. Biden’s heavier spending on advertising this spring appears to have put both sides on track to enter the summer relatively close to financial parity.
“Yes, Trump is raising more money now, and that should scare people,” said Brian Derrick, a strategist who created a Democratic fundraising platform called The Oath. “But at the end of the day, Biden has the funds he needs to run a very strong campaign.”
Mr. Trump has narrowed the gap by bringing in a flood of online donations after his criminal conviction in New York on May 30. In the minutes after the verdict, guilty on 34 counts of crime, the contributions came so fast that they were briefly overwhelmed by the Republican Party’s online donation portal, WinRed.
The Trump campaign said it raised $53 million online in the first 24 hours and $70 million in the first 48 hours after the verdict. The conviction also led to mega donations, including a $50 million donation from billionaire Timothy Mellon to a pro-Trump super PAC the day after the verdict.
At the conclusion of the Republican primary race, the Biden campaign and its allies argued that for all the vulnerabilities of the presidential election – troubling inflation, poor approval ratings, worries about his age – one clear advantage is cash.
Even as that edge begins to evaporate, the Biden campaign says it is using its early financial lead to build political infrastructure in battleground states that will pay dividends in November. On Thursday, the campaign announced that it had hired 1,000 staff members in 200 offices across the country.
“What’s in the FEC report doesn’t translate into boots on the ground tomorrow,” Dan Kanninen, Mr. Biden’s state director of battleground states, said in an interview. “It’s built over time that Donald Trump can’t go back.”
Money is rarely decisive in big races, such as for president, because voters already know about the candidates. But some of this year’s most important voters appear to be the ones who have quit — and breaking them can cost them a lot of money.
For months, Mr. Trump and his allies have simply run out of money to reach these voters. While his path to the Republican nomination was hardly bruising, he exited the primary race in relatively poor financial shape compared to Mr. Biden’s operation, which has spent nearly a year spending money.
Mr. Biden has united his party’s biggest donors. Mr. Trump has not done it on the side.
But the slow start has also given Mr Trump more room to grow. In the weeks since he dispatched Nikki Haley, the Republican Party’s last rival, Trump’s bundles have reflected on his nearly futile efforts to get back into his good graces.
A fundraising dinner at Mr. Trump’s Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago, in mid-February, a few weeks before Ms. Haley, became an important inflection point as Trump fund-raisers signaled for wavering donors that time due to indecision has come to close. A fundraising dinner hosted by John Paulson, the hedge fund billionaire, raised $50 million, the campaign said. And just in the last month, well-to-do holdouts like Blackstone co-founder Stephen A. Schwarzman have signaled that they plan to support Mr. Trump.
Stopping the nomination also allowed Mr. Trump to form a joint fundraising committee with the national and state Republican parties, an apparently technical move that meant he could raise hundreds of thousands of dollars more from each donor. Mr. Biden has been raising money in larger increments for months.
Online contributions will be important going forward because campaigns can’t tap their biggest donors for repeat contributions. And Mr. Trump’s base seems very animated with conviction. The campaign said a quarter of its contributors in May were new.
The question for Mr. Trump is how many of these people are repeat contributors. The Biden campaign has been aggressively cultivating repeat contributors online, a group that contributed $5.5 million in April and more in May, although the campaign did not provide specific numbers.
So far, Mr. Biden has enjoyed a tremendous advertising advantage over Mr. Trump.
Since the beginning of the year through this month, Mr. Biden’s operation has aired or saved an estimated $35.4 million in the six top warring states. Mr. Trump’s operation has done nothing in the country, spending about $60,000 in advertising, according to records from AdImpact, a media tracking firm.
Trump’s advisers say that Mr. Biden has spent tens of millions of dollars in key states without changing the trajectory of the race and will hurt his chances for the presidency in November.
Fundraisers for Mr. Biden have insisted that they will keep the upper hand when outside groups are involved. The constellation of pro-Biden super PACs and nonprofit groups outnumbered Trump allies by about 50 percent in the six most contested battlegrounds, according to AdImpact data.
Still, Biden’s dominance of the airwaves won’t last.
Mr. Trump’s main super PAC, Make America Great Again Inc., and its nonprofit arm, which can keep donors secret, paid nearly $17 million in the first half of the year for ads in Pennsylvania, the only battleground that made it significant. investment.
But this week, MAGA Inc. began reserving nearly $30 million in airtime starting in early July in Pennsylvania and Georgia, as part of what it has said will be a $100 million summer advertising blitz. Other pro-Trump super PACs have also begun planning ad pushes.
A Democratic fundraiser for Mr. Biden said he hoped Mr. Trump would eventually reach out and receive clear guidance from Rufus Gifford, the campaign’s top fundraising official, in a recent briefing. A Biden bundler compared the 2024 race to the summer of 2012, when Mitt Romney consistently beat President Barack Obama’s fundraising lead.
Other Democratic allies were more alarmed by the recent turn of events, speculating that the lasting political impact of Mr. Trump’s convictions will lie not with voters but with donors.
“It’s nerve-racking to see the money race even out,” said Jon Reinish, a Democratic political strategist. “That’s probably one of Biden’s real strengths. He’s also been spending money for months and doesn’t seem to be moving the needle much in the polls. Hopefully that changes as we get closer.
Now, Mr. Biden is racing to fill the cash register in June. He held a $30 million event in Los Angeles with Mr. Obama and Hollywood stars, as well as an $8 million background fundraiser on Tuesday at the home of Terry McAuliffe, the former governor of Virginia, with former President Bill Clinton among those in attendance. .
Others hope that Biden’s replacement can help raise money.
On the day of the first general election debate next week, the three Democratic gubernatorial front-runners – Andy Beshear of Kentucky, JB Pritzker of Illinois and Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan – will be in Los Angeles for fundraisers.
At the same time, various Republican vice presidential candidates will headline a debate watch party in Atlanta that will serve as a fundraiser.