In interviews, over a dozen major Republican Party donors and fundraisers who’ve signed on to help Trump raise money said they expected Trump to net only a fraction of his original $1 billion goal, perhaps netting less than a third of that.
Trump himself is already starting to distance himself from the $1 billion goal, telling Bloomberg News that he doesn’t need that much to win. But his refusal to commit to raise even half of that reflects reluctance among the GOP’s benefactors to collect cash on his behalf. Many of them say he might have trouble raising even $300 million.
That would almost certainly leave Trump at a steep disadvantage: Clinton is widely expected to hit the $1 billion mark, as President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney did in 2012. And it could have serious ripple-effects, leaving Republican down-ballot candidates, who are dependent on the national party to mount a well-funded turnout operation, in the lurch.
Perhaps the biggest hurdle, though, is that Trump is reviled by much of the donor class, who consider him as an unpredictable bomb-thrower. Many say they simply don’t want to have anything to do with him.
“He isn’t personally loved by most of the Republican donors. When you compare Mitt Romney to Donald Trump, Donald Trump says all these outrageous things. People are really concerned about what he’ll do as president. There’s just a lot of negativity about Trump as a person,” said Dale Dykema, a major GOP contributor who recently contributed to the RNC and who is supporting a Trump super PAC. “When he comes out with these crazy things, like with the judge, people just want to turn off.”(Continues at POLITICO)
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