Thanks to absurd New York prosecution, Trump's campaign is flush

Far from derailing his presidential campaign, as Team Biden so fervently hoped it would, Donald Trump’s conviction in the ridiculous New York case does not appear even to have impaired it. Bill explained why in this post.

But this doesn’t mean the conviction has lacked impact. To the contrary, it seems to have spurred a large surge in campaign donations to Trump — one the Washington Post fears could “dramatically reshape” the presidential race.

According to the Post:

Donors channeled tens of millions of dollars to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and the Republican National Committee immediately following his May 30 conviction. . .all but erasing the massive fundraising advantage that President Biden’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee once held.

Why the massive influx of money?

Trump’s advisers have attributed May’s surge in donations to donors’ desire to demonstrate their loyalty to the former president after his felony conviction.

That’s probably right. However, it’s also possible that non-loyalists wanted to express their outrage at the successful prosecution of Trump on BS charges.

I have no loyalty to Trump. I can’t stand the guy. But I was tempted to make a small contribution just to protest the miscarriage of justice in New York. (I resisted the urge.)

But even if Trump has now erased one major Biden advantage — a much larger war chest — he has yet to erase another. By all accounts, the Biden campaign has a huge edge in gearing up to get out the vote.

A month ago, I heard from a good source that the Trump campaign has few field offices in swing states, whereas Biden has a large network of them. This seems still to be a problem:

Biden’s campaign says it has also opened more than 200 offices and hired a staff of 1,000 people. It has already aired more than $65 million in television ads, according to the ad tracking firm AdImpact.

The Trump campaign says it has dozens of offices across the battleground states that are operated in coordination with the Republican National Committee, but it has declined to detail the scale of its operation other than to say it has an extensive paid and volunteer operation that is “expanding daily.”

Having recently received so much money, the Trump campaign should be able to keep expanding and, in fact, expand much more rapidly. It’s probably true, as the Biden campaign boosts, that “Trump cannot buy back the time he has lost” and that he “couldn’t match our battleground infrastructure if he tried.” But I suspect Trump doesn’t need to match Biden’s operation. He just needs to get within shouting distance of it.

Doing so is particularly urgent because some polls show that Biden fares at least as well as Trump among those most likely to vote. Trump’s edge comes from those who tend not to vote, but seem prepared to vote in this election.

This will only prove to be an edge if Trump is able to turn out most of these voters.

It’s also important to remember that spending lots of money doesn’t ensure a good get-out-the-vote operation. The money has to be spent wisely and the right people have to be in charge.

Trump campaign advisers say they are building a leaner, more efficient operation than in previous cycles and that they will rely on outside groups to supplement their ground game. “Leaner and more efficient” sounds good, but it is sometimes a euphemism for “inferior.”

As for relying on “outside groups,” the key, of course, is whether the groups in question deliver. In this case, Team Trump apparently is relying to a considerable degree on Turning Point USA.

According to this article in Washington Monthly, that outfit has no track record of success and, indeed, flopped in the 2022 Arizona gubernatorial race. The article cites Erick Erickson, who knows the inside baseball of conservative politics and electioneering. He suspects that Turning Point USA’s operation is “a grift.”

I have no independent knowledge of Turning Point USA’s character or track record, and no basis for evaluating its likely effectiveness in the upcoming election. However, placing major reliance on the group seems like a risky bet.

In any case, Trump’s recent fundraising success is good news for his campaign. It may be a necessary condition for converting his advantage in the polls into an electoral victory. However, it may not be a sufficient condition.