Hey, everyone. I'm David Chalian, CNN's political director. And welcome to the CNN Political Briefing. $50 million. That's the amount of money Donald Trump's campaign reports raising during a single fundraising event last Saturday. The event was held in the Palm Beach, Florida, home of billionaire investor John Paulson. This sets a record for a single fundraising event in presidential political history. Now, President Biden is the current frontrunner when it comes to fundraising in this race. But could this event signal that some of the Republican Party's biggest donors are ready to rally around Trump? Does that mean Trump could edge out Biden in the fundraising race? And how much does money matter in a race like this? Fredreka Schouten is a CNN politics national political writer who reports on money in politics. She's been following the 2024 fundraising very closely. Fredreka, thank you so much for being here.

Great to be here, David.

So let's start with the numbers. Just to give listeners a sense of what we're talking about here in terms of presidential politics. So the latest data we have is for the month of March. So for the month of March alone, can you compare what Joe Biden has raised versus what Donald Trump has raised?

Yes. So Biden and the Democratic Party, because he's raising money with them, raised more than $90 million in March, whereas Team Trump raised $65.6 million in March. But the big difference is the cash on hand. You know, Biden and the Democrats started April in really the general election battle with $192 million cash on hand. That's like a hundred million more than Team Trump had. So big catch up for the former president right now.

So big catch up. But it seems that the Trump team is catching up. Or at least they understand that if I look at these two mammoth individual fundraising events that each side held in the last couple of weeks, we had on the Democratic side with a lot of fanfare, Joe Biden and his two former Democratic predecessors, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, on the stage at Radio City Music Hall in front of thousands of adoring Democrats. And we had a fundraiser down in Palm Beach at the home of a potential Trump treasury secretary, should he, indeed get back into office. What did each of those individual events raise? What do you know about those events?

Well, the first event raised more than $26 million, which at that moment in time was a record for a single fundraiser. Donald Trump was determined to do more than better than that. And he has reported with the Republican Party raising $50.5 million down at John Paulson's house in Palm Beach, Florida, which, of course, he has said, look, it's it's double, double what he did. One president versus three. So obviously a big event. There were only about 117 people in attendance. So it was a very intimate and high dollar fundraiser compared to the event that we saw in New York.

So what does that mean, the high dollar fundraiser? What is a typical check size that gets written by one of those 117 attendees at John Paulson's home.

In Palm Beach? Well, the top ticket was $824,600. Now that is money that goes to the Trump campaign, Trump's leadership PAC, the Republican National Committee, and about 39 state and territorial party committees. So each of those committees has a limit on what they can raise. But this is a very efficient way to bring in money. One person or a couple write a big check, and then the money is split around all the committees.

Now how did that compare with what the Democrats were charging to get in the door at Radio City to see the three Democratic presidents?

Exactly. For them, now joe Biden and Democrats also have a joint fundraising committee, and it's almost $1 million at the at the highest level. But they weren't charging that it was actually 500,000 at the highest level. But they also had a lot of small dollar donors. They weren't trying to sort of achieve, you know, astronomical numbers necessarily, although that was like a really healthy amount of money.

I mean, it was a record for at least a week and a half or something like that.

Yeah, exactly. But the other thing that I think you need to take into account for Democrats, and one of the things that they touted is that it was a great month for them in terms of grassroots fundraising. And I don't know, I'm sure you get as many text as I do from the campaigns.

Yes, because we should tell our listeners as political reporters, we sign up for all the campaigns, fundraising emails and organizing emails and texts to keep an eye on what they're doing with this kind of recruitment.

Right. And so what they did is they they were really sort of raffling off the chance to meet the three presidents. And so you could give a donation as small as $20 for the chance to go to New York and be in that room. Now, that's incredibly valuable, because that's new information coming into the Biden campaign about people who are interested in seeing Democrats interested in supporting Democrats. So you're capturing that information. And keep in mind an individual donor. I'm not talking about the kind of person who could give to a joint fundraising committee, just like, you know, an average Joe, right, can give up to $3,300 for a primary or general election to a candidate. So I give you $20 and you start texting me and. It takes a while for me to hit the absolute limit, and that is really valuable. And that's part of sort of the Biden campaign push back on the Trump number is. Well, you were just in a room with a bunch of billionaires. We actually are spreading our message to a lot of people who will ultimately decide this election.

And to your point, Fredreka, if I am a rich Republican donor who wants to go to John Paulson's house in Palm Beach and write an $800,000 plus check to max out to all these committees that are combined doing this. That's it. You can't ask me for more money this cycle. Correct? I'm done giving at that point.

The well is dry. Exactly. And that's going to be the thing that we're going to have to watch for. You know who else shows up for Donald Trump? Because one of the issues, of course, over time is that he has been a very good fundraiser around small dollar donors. But here's the issue. He's never stopped asking them for money. I mean, I think we all remember, or at least those of us in sort of the world of politics is that, you know, he filed his paperwork for reelection the day he was inaugurated, when he lost the election, he kept asking people for money to help him fight the election loss. He has really gone to the well over and over and over again with those small dollar donors. And that's going to be one of the things that we're going to be looking for in the months ahead.

And since that first campaign, I don't believe he's ever given a dime of his own money to his campaign efforts since that 2016 campaign.

Right. In this 2016 campaign, he said he was going to donate, I think, more than 100 million and ended up being 66.1 million.

Which is no small amount of change.

Lots of money. But, no, he has he has not been very generous with his own campaign.

This begs the larger, perhaps the largest question I have for you. Does money matter in a presidential campaign? I get that money matters in House races and Senate races and governors races and local dogcatcher races. But in a presidential campaign that blots out the sun with free media coverage, where both sides are going to be funded well enough. Does it make a difference?

It doesn't always. I mean, let's go back to 2016. Hillary Clinton, establishment Democrat, swamped Donald Trump in fundraising, and still he won. At this point in the 2020 cycle, I looked it up today. Biden and Democrats were on $187 million behind Trump and the RNC in money in the bank. And they made up the difference. They more than made up the difference. You know, again, there are a lot of factors. You're absolutely right. In a presidential race are going to be outside groups, super PACs that come in and sort of help get the message out. It's it's not the only factor. And certainly both presidential nominees, major party nominees generally end up with enough money to get their message out.

Stay right there. We're going to take a quick break. We'll have a lot more with Fredreka Schouten my colleague here at CNN in just a moment. Welcome back. We're here with CNN politics national political writer Fredreka Schouten, who masters the very difficult task here at CNN of keeping track of all campaign finance related matters among a whole host of other things on her various beats. Fredreka, you had noted earlier in the podcast that both Donald Trump and Joe Biden have the ability to raise money combined with other entities, the National Party, state parties, PACs that are out there, in addition to their actual campaign account. Donald Trump has gotten a lot of attention for raising quite a bit of money for his what is known as a leadership PAC, Save America. And it turns out that that leadership PAC has been paying a slew of Donald Trump's legal bills over his challenges in various courts. Walk us through that. How much has Donald Trump used this leadership PAC for in terms of paying legal fees?

'So we did the math recently and since January 1st, 2021, Save America, this leadership PAC has spent more than $72.5 million on legal fees. Now, this is money that has helped Trump in terms of his personal legal difficulties. Whether it was the civil trial in New York over his business dealings or his, for criminal indictments. And it's also paid legal bills for other people in these cases. You know, some of his allies, some of his co-defendants. So obviously, this has been a serious pot of cash. You know, he is often loathed to pay bills on his own. And so this has been a pot of money that he's been able to use. One of the things that's interesting and unusual about his joint fundraising arrangement with the RNC is that the first pot of money goes to Donald Trump's campaign. The second slice of money goes to this leadership PAC. And then only after that does the Republican National Committee get its cut.

So Donald Trump can, according to the rules sequence, who gets their cut when. And so if somebody is writing a check that maybe is not a fully maxed out check, the first portion of that money goes to the campaign. And the next portion up goes to this fund that's being used to help people with legal fees.

Absolutely.

So do we know when that leadership PAC raises money? Do they tell people that their donations possibly could be going to fend off Jack Smith or the like in a in one of his trial?

It's definitely in the fine print of every solicitation. Whether people read all of those solicitations is another question. I mean, he's been raising money, even from small donors, for a very long time to benefit this PAC. Again, you get a text from him and it says, give me money. And for a very long time in the last couple of years, it said in the fine print that 90% went to Donald Trump's campaign and 10% went to Save America.

And in fact, those percentages changed at some point over time. Was that not the case? And this was his main fundraising vehicle in the aftermath of the 2020 election, before he was, presidential candidate?

Yes, exactly. It had been a very small percentage. And then one day it went up to 10% because, I mean, those bills got bigger. So definitely, he's been using donors money in this fashion for quite a while. I mean, when our colleagues have been out in the field talking to voters who've appeared at his rallies, most of them appear quite unconcerned about this. He's spent a lot of time talking about his legal troubles as being like their troubles. He hasn't cast them as personal problems. He has cast them as a witch hunt and a persecution of him and people like him, as he's really sought to sort of bring his supporters around to his cause. And we've spent some time looking at donations day by day. The very first time he appeared in court as a former president who had been charged in a criminal case. This was actually his arraignment in a Manhattan courthouse. His donations spiked because, you know, he showed up and he gave a speech. The other day that donations really spiked? When he was arraigned in Georgia in a criminal case there having to do with efforts to overturn the 2020 election. He showed up for his mug shot and used it as a fundraising tool, and the donations went up again. So I don't think that we are under the impression that Donald Trump's financial supporters don't understand how he's using the money.

And it's not just the donations that went up in each of those instances. His stronghold of political support inside the Republican primary electorate got stronger and stronger with each one of these events as well. And to your point about the 2016 election, it's not that money always tracks with votes, but they're not totally disconnected. And so this is all we're talking about on the racing side, we talked a little bit about the expenditure side with these legal fees. What else though, with these hundreds of millions of dollars raised and available in their accounts to spend in these next seven months or so of this election? What do these campaigns spend all this money on? What will the donors see for their donation?

Well, it's going to be a lot of advertising, of course. I mean, it's people are working very hard to get their messages out and trying to to paint their opponents. I mean, you are definitely seeing a lot of advertising on the Democratic side dealing with issues like abortion, which is which is the hot button. Ever since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade, you're going to see a lot of advertising on the Trump side about issues having to do with immigration and crime. But, you know, it also matters how you spend it in the field. And that's one of the things that the Biden campaign has been trying to tout. They're saying, look, we're opening offices, we're hiring people. We're going to be out in the battleground states. We haven't seen as much detail yet from Team Trump about the infrastructure that they've created. And keep in mind that he's in some ways a little behind. I mean, he had a primary, although he has been a dominant figure in Republican politics now for years. Nikki Haley decided that she was going to hang in there and challenge him a bit longer. And so he had to spend some money and effort fending her off, although he did it handily. And so you have less of a sense that he has built a campaign infrastructure in his campaign. While Biden has had the running room as the incumbent to do that.

It's like the flip flop of four years ago. You were saying, you know, Biden emerged from that very competitive Democratic primary, far behind the incumbent Republican president at the time, Donald Trump, who had amassed a huge cash advantage and was able to deploy that. Of course, Covid got in the way for a full kind of field program in that race. But but it is sort of the reverse that these two men are experiencing this time around.

And so what he's going to need to do, former President Trump, that is, is really rely on the Republican National Committee to help build the infrastructure. And the issue is that the Republican National Committee hasn't had as much money. So they're trying to to make up ground as well. I mean, at one point at the end of last year, the RNC only had something like $8 million cash on hand, which was like the lowest amount they'd had in a decade. So they're really trying now with the combined effort with Trump to sort of shore up finances. And you also have some state parties in battleground states that have had some very difficult times in terms of fundraising and leadership. I'm looking at you, Michigan. And so, that there's going to have to just be this rapid ramp up, which is why I think you see Donald Trump on this fundraising spree, that fundraiser in Palm Beach. There's just a bunch of fundraisers in a in a few days here in Florida and Georgia and Pennsylvania trying to build up the party's coffers and Donald Trump's coffers.

Now, you already gave me an answer to a question I didn't even ask yet. That's how good you are, Fredrika, about on the Trump side, about what you'll be looking for when the next round of financial reports come out. You said on the Trump side, you're going to be looking to see how much of that small dollar donor base still exists or how much trouble Trump is having maintaining that. What about on the Biden side when the next round of reports come out? What will you be looking for as you scrape the Biden campaign's financial reports?

Well, again, I am interested in their small dollar donors as well. I mean, that will be important. You also want to see how many people are maxed out that they can't sort of come back to again. You want to look at spending on both sides to see really what sort of infrastructure do they. How do they compare to one another? What are the staffing levels?

This is, to many people, green eye shade, mind numbing journalistic work that you're doing to go through these reports. Do you enjoy this beat and if so, why?

Some days I do, and some days at like 2 a.m. waiting for a report to come in, or still going through a report that came in at the last minute. It gets tough. It's important. It's important to do actually the hard things. That's one of the things I love about journalism is that, you know, people throw out numbers and then in the middle of the night you can say, really? Is that what you did? And you can make connections that are not... It's hard to spin the numbers, frankly. And that's the fun part. I mean, it doesn't always make me the most popular person. I mean, lots of campaigns don't want to talk to me and when I'm calling and saying, hey, I don't understand here. Your numbers don't add up. You double counted. I'm the last person they want to hear from, but it's rewarding work, definitely is.

That's great. Thank you so much, Fredreka. I really appreciate your time.

Thanks, David.

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