Former President Donald J. Trump’s campaign cut ties late last week with a number of digital firms that had been fund-raising for the campaign and slashed the commission that the remaining vendors can retain by 10 percentage points, according to four people briefed on the changes.
The moves come as Mr. Trump has fallen far behind Vice President Kamala Harris in the cash race, and they suggest that the Republican operation is seeking to narrow its donor outreach in the final weeks of the campaign to those contributors who are most immediately profitable.
Mr. Trump’s campaign told the digital fund-raising companies that were being retained that their share of incoming donations was being reduced to 59 percent of new donations solicited. At least some of the firms had previously gotten as much as 70 percent of the first donation they recruited to the campaign, said the four people, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter.
Karoline Leavitt, a Trump campaign spokeswoman, declined to answer specific questions about the changes. “President Trump is a fund-raising machine who has built the most robust list of grass-roots donors ever in politics which will fuel his return to the White House,” she said.
Under the new arrangement, the Republican firm that has overseen Mr. Trump’s online fund-raising for much of the year, Launchpad, had been set to receive 1 percent of every new donation given, according to two people briefed on the matter.
But at least some senior campaign officials had been unaware of that plan. After The New York Times inquired about it, the two people said that the 1 percent payment for Launchpad would not be put into place.
Launchpad declined to comment.
The world of digital donor list brokering and fund-raising is obscure and lucrative.
The outside fund-raising firms that the Trump campaign had been working with own independent lists of regular Republican contributors. The firms then solicit those people to ask them to contribute to Mr. Trump. In exchange, the firms received a significant cut of the first donation given.
This process of prospecting for new donors can be profitable for a candidate because it costs nothing and nets some money. Perhaps most important, the contact information for the new donors is given to the campaign, which can solicit them repeatedly.
Mr. Trump already has amassed, by far, the largest list of small donors in Republican politics. Two people said that one reason for the change was that roughly 86 percent of the donations that outside firms were collecting were already part of the Trump database of emails.
Mr. Trump’s donor list is seen as among his most valuable campaign assets, constructed over nearly a decade in politics.
Maggie Haberman contributed reporting.
Source: Elections - nytimes.com
