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    El sitio web de donantes de la campaña de Trump colapsa tras el veredicto

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    Donald Trump comenzó a solicitar donaciones por su condena por delito grave casi inmediatamente después del veredicto.[Estamos en WhatsApp. Empieza a seguirnos ahora]WinRed, el procesador de pagos para las donaciones de la campaña republicana, se cayó tras la condena por delito grave del expresidente Donald Trump, un problema técnico que su campaña atribuyó al número de personas que intentaban donar inmediatamente después del veredicto.“Tantos estadounidenses se animaron a donar a la campaña del presidente Trump que las páginas de WinRed se cayeron”, dijo la campaña de Trump en un comunicado en las redes sociales.El sitio web ya no muestra un mensaje de error al visitar la página de donaciones para la campaña de Trump, aunque no está claro si el sitio web funciona correctamente y procesa las donaciones. La campaña de Trump no respondió inmediatamente a una solicitud de comentarios.Trump comenzó a solicitar donaciones por su condena por delito grave, casi inmediatamente después de que se leyera el veredicto en el tribunal de Manhattan. En declaraciones en su sitio web de redes sociales, Truth Social, Trump publicó enlaces al sitio web de la campaña, que redirigía a la página WinRed, que no funcionaba correctamente.Esa página de donaciones muestra una gran imagen de la ficha policial de Trump, que fue tomada en Atlanta después de que Trump se entregara en la prisión del condado de Fulton por su caso penal de Georgia, con la leyenda “Nunca te rindas”. La página también describe a Trump como un “preso político” e hizo un llamado a “DIEZ MILLONES de patriotas pro-Trump” para que donaran antes de que acabara el día.Chris Cameron cubre política para el Times, centrándose en noticias de última hora y en la campaña de 2024. Más de Chris Cameron More

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      Trump Announces $34.8 Million Fund-Raising Haul After Guilty Verdict

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      Former President Donald J. Trump’s campaign announced that he had raised $34.8 million in the wake of his felony conviction, shattering online records for Republicans and an early sign of the extent to which the base was rallying behind him.The campaign said in a statement that nearly 30 percent of the donors who gave online were new to the party’s online donating platform, WinRed, giving the former president an invaluable infusion of new contributions to tap in the coming months. The Trump campaign said the haul was double its previous best day ever on WinRed. And the one-day haul was nearly 10 times the $4 million Mr. Trump raised when his mug shot was released in 2023, after his booking in Atlanta for his indictment there.The figures will not be verifiable until the campaign committees and WinRed make their filings with the Federal Election Commission in the following months.Cash has been one of President Biden’s advantages so far in the race. His campaign has been advertising in key battleground states since Mr. Trump emerged as the Republican nominee while Mr. Trump has been absent from the airwaves. The post-conviction money will help Mr. Trump close the gap with the Democratic incumbent.The one-day haul was even greater than the $26 million that the Biden campaign had announced four years ago in the 24 hours after he had named Kamala Harris as his vice-presidential pick.“From just minutes after the sham trial verdict was announced, our digital fund-raising system was overwhelmed with support, and despite temporary delays online because of the amount of traffic, President Trump raised $34.8 million dollars from small-dollar donors,” said Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, two of Mr. Trump’s top advisers, in a joint statement. “President Trump and our campaign are immensely grateful from this outpouring of support from patriots across our country.” In April, Mr. Trump’s operation, working in concert with the Republican National Committee, announced that it had raised $76.2 million, beating for the first time what Mr. Biden’s shared operations with the Democratic National Committee, brought in — $51 million.The conviction appeared to be driving Democratic donations, as well, though to a much lesser extent.ActBlue, which processes online contributions for Democrats, registered three of its four biggest hours of donations in all of 2024 on Thursday evening in the wake of the conviction, topping out near $1.3 million in a single hour, according to its online ticker. More

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      DeSantis, With a Subtle Maneuver, Hides His Small-Dollar Donations

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      The campaign of the Florida governor, who is known to be reliant on rich donors, worked with a Republican fund-raising powerhouse to prevent the disclosure of information on small contributors.When WinRed, the company that processes nearly all online Republican campaign contributions, recently released its enormous trove of donor data for the first half of the year, donations were conspicuously absent for one presidential candidate: Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida.It was no technical glitch. The DeSantis campaign worked with WinRed in a way that prevented the disclosure of donor information, ensuring that the campaign’s small donors would remain anonymous, according to a person familiar with the campaign.The arrangement appears to be the first of its kind for a presidential campaign since WinRed’s founding four years ago and could presage a return to an era in which far less information on small donors is made public, at least for Republicans.Representatives for Mr. DeSantis declined to describe details of the arrangement. The person familiar with the campaign said the aim was to prevent other campaigns from poaching Mr. DeSantis’s donors.But the move has other effects, including obscuring exactly how many — or how few — online donations Mr. DeSantis has received.His dependency on larger contributors has been a source of concern for his campaign, after his first financial report last month revealed that less than 15 percent of his $20 million haul had come from donors who gave less than $200. News emerged on Tuesday that Mr. DeSantis had replaced his campaign manager as part of a broad shake-up.Matt Mackowiak, a Republican consultant based in Texas, said he was not convinced of the value of concealing small donors — “Generally, small donors don’t care about disclosure,” he said — but he also did not see much of a threat to transparency in the campaign’s arrangement.“To me, the single most important aspect of the transparent philosophical debate is: Is somebody buying influence?” Mr. Mackowiak said. “You’re not going to buy anyone with a $200 or less donation.”Until recent years, he noted, small donations were never broken out in federal campaign finance disclosures. In a sense — and to the all but certain dismay of those who push for transparency — the move by the DeSantis campaign suggests a return to a previous era when those contributions remained anonymous.WinRed was set up in 2019 as a conservative answer to ActBlue, a nonprofit group that since 2004 has served as the central platform to process online donations for Democratic candidates and causes. ActBlue has been widely credited with establishing Democratic dominance in small-dollar fund-raising, and Republicans had long been eager for their own version.Unlike ActBlue, the heart of WinRed is a for-profit company. But its political action committee, like ActBlue’s, has served as a conduit for contributions to campaigns. Donors would give to the campaign through a webpage run by WinRed, which then distributed the money to it.In the 2020 election cycle, WinRed received and forwarded over $2.2 billion in online contributions; ActBlue was a conduit for more than $4.2 billion.While political campaigns are not required to itemize contributions under $200, the PACs for WinRed and ActBlue have to provide information on every donor. Their filings offered the public the only details about campaigns’ small-dollar contributions.WinRed has fought the requirement that it disclose every donor. It is currently in litigation with the Federal Election Commission and seeks to raise the threshold to $200, arguing that the requirement is burdensome and is not in keeping with the drastic growth of small-dollar donations.A spokesman for WinRed did not respond to requests for comment.WinRed recently started offering “merchant” accounts, in which the company acts not as a conduit, but as a typical payment processor. Mr. DeSantis’s campaign chose this option, the person familiar with the campaign said, cutting WinRed’s PAC and its disclosure requirements out of the picture.It appears to be the first time a presidential campaign has opted for this arrangement. The former chief executive of WinRed, Carl Sceusa, is currently the chief financial and chief technology officer of the DeSantis campaign.The difference in disclosure is vast.WinRed’s filing last week showed that Mr. Trump’s main fund-raising committee processed 1,328,930 donations in the first six months of the year. It showed nothing about Mr. DeSantis, whose campaign reported only 15,462 donations above $200 on his campaign’s Federal Election Commission filing. There was no information about the donors who gave less than $200. His campaign has said he has topped the 40,000 donors needed to make the first debate stage, but only a fraction of them are now disclosed.“Using the payment processor model allows them to not have to itemize those donors,” said Adav Noti, senior vice president and legal director at the Campaign Legal Center, a nonprofit campaign ethics group. “That’s a business question, not a legal question.”The vendor arrangement raises some legal questions, Mr. Noti said: First, whether WinRed’s merchant arm is, itself, a de facto political group, which would have to register as a political action committee.“F.E.C. rules are pretty clear that payment processors can’t be partisan,” Mr. Noti said.The strategy may be most notable for what it could suggest to competitors about Mr. DeSantis’s campaign.“To the extent that unitemized contributions could tell you something about a candidate that might be valuable, it’s that they are regional, in one place,” Mr. Mackowiak, the strategist, said. “The only thing I can think of is that their small donor base may be primarily Florida-based, and they didn’t want to appear like a regional candidate.” More

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      DeSantis’s Risky Strategy: Trying Not to Trick Small Donors

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      Diverging from Donald Trump, who has often cajoled, guilt-tripped and even misled small donors, the DeSantis team is pledging to avoid “smoke and mirrors” in its online fund-raising.In the months before the 2020 presidential election, Roy W. Bailey, a Dallas businessman, received a stream of text messages from Donald J. Trump’s re-election campaign, asking for money in persistent, almost desperate terms.“Have you forgotten me?” the messages read, Mr. Bailey recalled. “Have you deserted us?”Mr. Bailey was familiar with the Trump campaign: He was the co-chair of its finance committee, helped raise millions for the effort and personally contributed several thousand dollars.“Think about that,” Mr. Bailey said recently about the frequency of the messages and the beseeching tone. “That is how out of control and crazy some of this fund-raising has gotten.”He did, ultimately, desert Mr. Trump: He is now raising money for Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, whose campaign has pledged to avoid the kinds of online fund-raising tactics that irritated Mr. Bailey and that have spread in both parties, particularly the Republican Party, in recent years as candidates have tried to amass small donors.No phony deadlines, Mr. DeSantis has promised donors. No wildly implausible pledges that sizable contributions will be matched by committees affiliated with the campaign. And no tricking donors into recurring donations.This strategy is one of the subtle ways Mr. DeSantis’s team is trying to contrast him with Mr. Trump, who has often cajoled, guilt-tripped and occasionally misled small donors. Although his campaign has not directly called out Mr. Trump’s methods, on the day Mr. DeSantis declared he would run for president, his website prominently vowed to eschew “smoke and mirrors,” “fake matches” and “lies” in its fund-raising.For the DeSantis campaign, the vow of no trickery is risky. Mr. Trump, the most successful online Republican fund-raiser ever, has shown that such tactics work. But Generra Peck, Mr. DeSantis’s campaign manager, said that approach damaged the long-term financial health of the Republican Party because it risked alienating small donors.“We’re building a movement,” Ms. Peck said last month in an interview at DeSantis campaign headquarters in Tallahassee.So far, it’s difficult to tell if Mr. DeSantis’s approach is working. His fund-raising slowed after his campaign began in late May, and campaign officials did not provide figures that would have shed light on its success with small donors.It is difficult to tell if Gov. Ron DeSantis’s approach is working. His fund-raising slowed after his campaign began in late May, and campaign officials did not provide figures that would have shed light on its success with small donors.Christopher Lee for The New York TimesThe battle to raise money from average Americans may seem quaint in the era of billionaires and super PACs, which have taken on outsize roles in U.S. elections. But straight campaign cash is still, in many ways, the lifeblood of a campaign, and a powerful measure of the strength of a candidate. For example, G.O.P. presidential contenders must reach a threshold of individual donors set by the Republican National Committee to qualify for the debate stage, a bar that is already causing some candidates to engage in gimmicky contortions.To highlight what it bills as a more ethical approach to fund-raising, the DeSantis campaign has devoted a giant wall inside its modest office to scrawling the names — first name, last initial — of every donor to the campaign, tens of thousands of them so far.It is an intensive effort. During work hours, campaign staff members — as well as Mr. DeSantis himself, in one instance — constantly write names on the wall in red, blue and black markers.“We want our staff to look at that wall, remember who supports us, to remember why we’re here,” Ms. Peck said.Mr. DeSantis’s advisers argue that being more transparent with donors could be a long-term way for Republicans to counter the clear advantage Democrats have built up in internet fund-raising, largely thanks to their online platform ActBlue, founded in 2004. A Republican alternative, WinRed, didn’t get off the ground until 15 years later. A greater share of Democrats than Republicans said they had donated to a political campaign in the last two years, according to a recent NBC News poll, meaning the G.O.P. has a less robust pool of donors to draw from.“One of the biggest challenges for Republicans, across the board, is building out the small-dollar universe,” said Kristin Davison, the chief operating officer of Never Back Down, the main super PAC supporting Mr. DeSantis.The tell-the-truth approach to deadlines and goals has been tested by other campaigns, including those of Senator Bernie Sanders, who built a durable network of grass-roots donors in his two presidential runs.Mr. DeSantis’s campaign said last week that it had raised $20 million in his first six weeks as an official presidential candidate, but the amount that came from small donors will not be apparent until later this month, when campaigns file second-quarter disclosures.The campaign did not respond to a question about how many small donors had contributed so far. It had set a goal of recruiting 100,000 donors by July 1, but as of late June, the wall had only about 50,000 names, according to a fund-raising email.And although Mr. DeSantis’s team has pledged to act transparently when it comes to small donors, senior aides in the governor’s office have faced accusations that they inappropriately pressured lobbyists into donating to his campaign.Eric Wilson, the director of the Center for Campaign Innovation, a conservative nonprofit focused on digital politics, said the DeSantis campaign was wise to avoid online pressure tactics, which he likened to a “dopamine arms race” that burns out donors and turns off voters.“They can be effective, but voters say they don’t like them,” Mr. Wilson said. “You can’t make the entire meal around sugar.”Mr. Wilson said he had also seen other campaigns try more honest communications: “You are starting to see a recalibration.”For instance, the campaign of former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina said in May that Mr. DeSantis had imitated language used in Ms. Haley’s fund-raising emails.The ways that campaigns reach out to potential small donors online grew out of old-fashioned telemarketing and fund-raising by mail. Before email, campaigns sent out fake telegrams, letters stamped to appear they had been hand-addressed, surveys and other gimmicks to draw donations.The DeSantis campaign has also adopted a “subscriber exclusive” model, allowing donors to join so-called tele-town halls with Mr. DeSantis, gain early access to merchandise and receive weekly “insider” updates. Nicole Craine for The New York TimesIn the era of email and smartphones, it is easier to reach a large number of prospective donors, but the risk of bombarding and overwhelming them is higher. It can also be harder to induce people to open messages, let alone contribute. The subject line has to be compelling, and the offers need to stand out — which can lead, for example, to dubious promises that campaigns will somehow “match” any contributions made, a practice that has been widely criticized.Mr. Trump’s campaign sends about 10 emails per day, in addition to text messages. His campaign has escalated bogus matching promises to the point of absurdity, telling donors that their contributions will be matched at “1,500%.”A spokesman for the Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.The tactics aren’t limited to Republicans. Democratic groups have also been criticized and mocked for vague promises of “300 percent matches” in their fund-raising pitches.For its part, the DeSantis campaign said its strategy was devised to establish long-term relationships with small donors, rather than to suck them dry as quickly as possible.The DeSantis campaign has adopted a “subscriber exclusive” model, allowing donors to join so-called tele-town halls with Mr. DeSantis (“You guys are part of the team,” the governor told listeners during a June 12 call), gain early access to merchandise, and receive weekly “insider” updates. It’s the carrot, not the stick, a blueprint that campaign officials said was adopted in part from the business world.Mr. Trump’s campaign has clearly taken notice.The DeSantis campaign said recently that it had raised $20 million in his first six weeks as a candidate, but the amount that came from small donors will not be apparent until later this month. Rachel Mummey for The New York TimesOn Friday, in an apparent round of fund-raising one-upsmanship, the Trump campaign announced a new donor initiative, saying it would build a “big, beautiful Donor Wall” at its New Hampshire headquarters.“And I don’t mean scribbled on the wall with a crayon, like some other campaigns do,” said the campaign email, which was written in Mr. Trump’s voice, “but a heavy, respectable plaque with the names of our great donors finely etched within.”All for a donation of $75.Patricia Mazzei More

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      Top Republicans Balk at WinRed’s Plan to Charge More for Online Donations

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      Republican Party leaders are opposed to a proposed price increase by the online donation-processing company, WinRed, stirring debate about the company’s future.A battle over a threatened price increase has exposed growing tensions between top Republican Party officials and the company with a virtual monopoly on processing Republican campaign contributions online.Party leaders have risen up in opposition to the plan to raise prices, which would siphon millions of dollars from G.O.P. campaigns less than 20 months after the company, WinRed, had said its finances were robust enough to forego an extra fee on every transaction.In a series of private meetings in recent weeks, Gerrit Lansing, the president of WinRed, has told the leaders of the Republican National Committee, the House and Senate campaign arms and former President Donald J. Trump’s campaign that WinRed’s prices needed to go up.The Republican officials all objected.Mr. Lansing’s company, a private for-profit firm responsible for processing almost all online Republican political donations, charges 3.94 percent of almost every donation made online. But he said it wasn’t enough, citing an unforeseen slowdown in online G.O.P. giving last year and also plans to broaden WinRed’s suite of services. He moved to impose a 30-cent transaction fee on each of the tens of millions of coming contributions in the 2024 race, according to several people directly involved in or briefed on the conversations.The plan to raise prices appears to have stalled over fierce G.O.P. objections, according to people involved in the talks. But the episode has accelerated conversations at the party’s highest levels about the decision four years ago to clear the way for WinRed to dominate the online donation-processing field, and about whether the for-profit company’s model needs to be reassessed. Democrats process most online donations through ActBlue, which, unlike WinRed, is an independent nonprofit. ActBlue charges a flat rate of 3.95 percent per donation and does not charge an additional per-transaction fee.“WinRed is constantly evaluating what it takes to compete against and leapfrog ActBlue, combat the Democrats’ campaign to attack us by all means available, and still make the necessary investments to provide our customers with the features they need to win,” WinRed said in a statement. “At this time, WinRed has no announcements to make regarding pricing.”Representatives for the party committees declined to comment.Gerrit Lansing, the president of WinRed, has told officials about a plan to charge an extra fee on every transaction.Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call, Getty ImagesMr. Lansing’s pursuit of outside investors to expand WinRed’s digital footprint and offerings — including talks with advisers to Paul Singer, a major Republican financier — has spurred further discussions about the company’s ownership structure.The obscure industry of processing donations online is deeply consequential for Republicans because the party has faced a persistent digital fund-raising deficit against Democrats. WinRed has been held up as the linchpin of the party’s plans to help close that gap.Huge sums are involved. There were nearly 31.2 million donations made on WinRed during the 2022 federal elections, worth nearly $1.2 billion. The upcoming presidential cycle could easily double that.The creation of WinRed in 2019 was supposed to be one of Mr. Trump’s enduring legacies within the Republican infrastructure, a bold bid to unify the party around a single platform to help shrink the G.O.P. fund-raising gap with ActBlue. Mr. Trump, his son-in-law Jared Kushner and Mr. Trump’s campaign manager at the time, Brad Parscale, were all personally involved.The site has largely been a success, achieving near-universal adoption among G.O.P. campaigns. WinRed originally had charged 3.8 percent of contributions with an additional 30-cent transaction fee. That amounted to an especially steep share of smaller contributions — 68 cents, or nearly 7 percent, of a $10 donation, for instance.A Trump rally in Waco, Texas, in March. As president, Donald J. Trump was among those personally involved in the creation of WinRed in 2019.Christopher Lee for The New York TimesIn late 2021, Mr. Lansing trumpeted the removal of the 30-cent transaction fee, saying the company had been able to “achieve and maintain scale.” But the decision by credit card companies to raise their own fees not long afterward made WinRed’s move unsustainable, according to a person close to the company, as most of its processing fees are quickly spent on credit card costs.In recent weeks, Mr. Lansing told party officials that WinRed had suffered financially in 2022 as a result of diminished Republican giving and that he needed to reimpose a per-transaction fee ahead of 2024 to continue broader investments in technology. Because WinRed is a private firm, its executive compensation and the state of its finances remain mostly hidden from public view. Records show that federal candidates and committees paid WinRed at least $64 million in the 2022 election cycle; those funds were not all from processing fees but also included significant vendor fees, according to a person close to WinRed.Its Democratic counterpart, ActBlue, has faced a financial pinch too, announcing in early April plans to lay off 17 percent of its work force. ActBlue discloses more of its finances than its counterpart does, including the amount of donors who volunteered to add “tips” on top of their donations. Those tips go directly to ActBlue and have built a $68.7 million balance in ActBlue’s federal account as of the end of 2022. Mr. Lansing has begun discussing adding the option to make tips to the Republican site as well, according to people involved in the conversations.WinRed faces other unique pressures, including an investigation by multiple state attorneys general into the firm’s use of prechecked boxes that automatically signed up donors to make recurring donations unless they opted out. A New York Times investigation in 2021 revealed how the extensive use of those boxes — known internally as “money bombs” for withdrawing more than one donation at a time — spurred an enormous wave of demands for refunds and complaints of fraud to credit card companies at the end of the 2020 campaign.WinRed sued to block subpoenas but lost a key legal battle in February when the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the investigation could proceed in Minnesota. In New York, a December filing from the state attorney general, Letitia James, that demanded compliance with a subpoena gave a glimpse into the internal documents her office has already obtained. The filing cited an internal WinRed memo as saying that, at one point in June 2020, donors who were opted into multiple donations through pre-checked boxes had caused a surge of phone calls and “a 10,000 message deep queue over one weekend.” Recurring donations were dropping over time, the memo theorized, because “as donors get used to or go through the process they become more savvy.”One Republican candidate who saw a surge of refund requests from people who were unwittingly opted into recurring donations was Kelly Loeffler, a senator who lost her runoff in Georgia in January 2021 and who found the experience of working with WinRed jarring.“It absolutely was a red flag,” Ms. Loeffler said in an interview, referring to the deluge of refund requests. Ms. Loeffler, a former co-owner of the Women’s National Basketball Association team in Atlanta, has since bought donation-processing technology from a Republican firm that stopped its business after the creation of WinRed. She has rebranded the technology and now uses it in running RallyRight, another company that processes online donations.“We have seen a need for a competitor in this market,” Ms. Loeffler said.So far, she is undercutting WinRed on price — charging 3.5 percent of donations — and ensuring that “no campaign can automatically check a recurring payments box.” She declined to name specific Republican groups that she has spoken with but said the price could go even lower — down to 3 percent — with “the scale of some of the organizations we are talking to.”Ms. Loeffler said that she was in the business not for personal profit but to direct more money to campaigns. “It’s absolutely not about me making millions of dollars,” she said. “I’ve done that.” More

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      How a Record Cash Haul Vanished for Senate Republicans

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      The campaign arm of Senate Republicans had collected $181.5 million by the end of July — but spent 95 percent of it. A big investment in digital, and hyperaggressive tactics, have not paid off.It was early 2021, and Senator Rick Scott wanted to go big. The new chairman of the Senate Republican campaign arm had a mind to modernize the place. One of his first decisions was to overhaul how the group raised money online.Mr. Scott installed a new digital team, spearheaded by Trump veterans, and greenlit an enormous wave of spending on digital ads, not to promote candidates but to discover more small contributors. Soon, the committee was smashing fund-raising records. By the summer of 2021, Mr. Scott was boasting about “historic investments in digital fund-raising that are already paying dividends.”A year later, some of that braggadocio has vanished — along with most of the money.The National Republican Senatorial Committee has long been a critical part of the party apparatus, recruiting candidates, supporting them with political infrastructure, designing campaign strategy and buying television ads.By the end of July, the committee had collected a record $181.5 million — but had already spent more than 95 percent of what it had brought in. The Republican group entered August with just $23.2 million on hand, less than half of what the Senate Democratic committee had ahead of the final intense phase of the midterm elections.Now top Republicans are beginning to ask: Where did all the money go?The answer, chiefly, is that Mr. Scott’s enormous gamble on finding new online donors has been a costly financial flop in 2022, according to a New York Times analysis of federal records and interviews with people briefed on the committee’s finances. Today, the N.R.S.C. is raising less than before Mr. Scott’s digital splurge.Party leaders, including Senator Mitch McConnell, are fretting aloud that Republicans could squander their shot at retaking the Senate in 2022, with money one factor as some first-time candidates have struggled to gain traction. The N.R.S.C. was intended to be a party bulwark yet found itself recently canceling some TV ad reservations in key states.The story of how the Senate G.O.P. committee went from breaking financial records to breaking television reservations, told through interviews with more than two dozen Republican officials, actually begins with the rising revenues Mr. Scott bragged about last year.One fund-raising scheme by the N.R.S.C. involved text messages that asked provocative questions, including “Should Biden resign?” A request for cash that followed did not reveal where the money was going.Doug Mills/The New York TimesThe committee had squeezed donors with hyperaggressive new tactics. And all the money coming in obscured just how much the committee was spending advertising for donors. Then inflation sapped online giving for Republicans nationwide. And the money that had rolled in came at an ethical price.One fund-raising scheme used by the Senate committee, which has not previously been disclosed, involved sending an estimated millions of text messages that asked provocative questions — “Should Biden resign?” — followed by a request for cash: “Reply YES to donate.” Those who replied “YES” had their donation processed immediately, though the text did not reveal in advance where the money was going.Privately, some Republicans complained the tactic was exploitative. WinRed, the party’s main donation-processing platform, recently stepped in and took the unusual step of blocking the committee from engaging in the practice, according to four people familiar with the matter.The texts had been part of a concerted push that successfully juiced fund-raising, though it used methods that experts say will eventually exhaust even the most loyal givers.One internal N.R.S.C. budget document from earlier this year, obtained by The Times, shows that $23.3 million was poured into investments to find new donors between June 2021 and January 2022. In that time, the contributors the organization found gave $6.1 million — a more than $17 million deficit.Mr. Scott declined an interview request. His staff vigorously denied financial struggles, said some of the canceled television ads had been rebooked, and argued the digital spending would prove wise in time.More Coverage of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsAn Upset in Alaska: Mary Peltola, a Democrat, beat Sarah Palin in a special House election, adding to a series of recent wins for the party. Ms. Peltola will become the first Alaska Native to serve in Congress.Evidence Against a Red Wave: Since the fall of Roe v. Wade, it’s hard to see the once-clear signs of a Republican advantage. A strong Democratic showing in a New York special election is one of the latest examples.G.O.P.’s Dimming Hopes: Republicans are still favored in the fall House races, but former President Donald J. Trump and abortion are scrambling the picture in ways that distress party insiders.Digital Pivot: At least 10 G.O.P. candidates in competitive races have updated their websites to minimize their ties to Mr. Trump or to adjust their uncompromising stances on abortion.“We made the investment, we’re glad we did it, it will benefit the N.R.S.C. and the party as a whole for cycles to come,” said Chris Hartline, a spokesman for Mr. Scott and the committee.Yet as Republican chances to retake the Senate have slipped, a full-blown case of finger-pointing has erupted across Washington, with Mr. Scott a prime target. His handling of the committee’s finances has become conflated with other critiques, especially a flawed field of Republicans who have found themselves outspent on television.Mr. Scott’s please-all-sides decision to stay out of contested 2022 primaries has been second-guessed, including by Mr. McConnell. Mr. Scott’s detractors accuse him of transforming the N.R.S.C. into the “National Rick Scott Committee” — and a vehicle for his presidential ambitions.“The spending wouldn’t matter if the polling numbers looked better,” said Liam Donovan, a Republican lobbyist and N.R.S.C. donor. “To the extent the red wave is receding, people look for someone to blame.”The financial fortunes of the group alone will not sink Republican chances in November. A super PAC aligned with Mr. McConnell has more than $160 million in television reservations booked after Labor Day.Mr. Hartline dismissed those questioning the group’s digital spending as “disgruntled former staff and vendors.” He said the $28 million invested had tripled its file of email addresses and phone numbers and added 160,000 donors.“Our goal is to build the biggest G.O.P. digital file to help the party now and in the future,” he said. He declined to discuss the texting scheme.Mr. Hartline said the Senate Democratic arm has more money because it had not yet spent significantly on television. Mr. Scott, he said, had strategically spent early, with nearly $30 million on ads aiding Republicans through July.That sum, however, is actually less than the $37.4 million the G.O.P. committee reported in independent expenditures for candidates as of the same date two years ago.A huge online outlayFor months last year, the National Republican Senatorial Committee was far and away the nation’s biggest online political advertiser, outspending every other party committee combined and pouring money into platforms like Google at levels almost unseen except in the fevered final days of 2020.The sums were so breathtakingly large — peaking at more than $100,000 a day on Facebook and Google — that some concerned Democrats began to study the ads, fretting that somehow Republicans had unlocked a new sustainable way to raise money online.They had not.The Senate Republican bet had been this: By spending vast amounts early, the party could vacuum up contact information for millions of potential donors who could then give repeatedly over the coming months. More

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      Republicans Confront Unexpected Online Money Slowdown

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      Online fund-raising has slowed across much of the Republican Party in recent months, an unusual pullback of small donors that has set off a mad rush among Republican political operatives to understand why — and reverse the sudden decline before it damages the party’s chances this fall.Small-dollar donations typically increase as an election nears. But just the opposite has happened in recent months across a wide range of Republican entities, including every major party committee and former President Donald J. Trump’s political operation.The total amount donated online fell by more than 12 percent across all federal Republican campaigns and committees in the second quarter compared with the first quarter, according to an analysis of federal records from WinRed, the main online Republican donation-processing portal.More alarming for Republicans: Democratic contributions surged at the same time. Total federal donations on ActBlue, the Democratic counterpart, jumped by more than 21 percent.The overall Democratic fund-raising edge online widened by $100 million from the last quarter of 2021 to the most recent three-month period, records show.Exacerbating the fund-raising problems for Republicans is that Mr. Trump continues to be the party’s dominant fund-raiser and yet virtually none of the tens of millions of dollars he has raised has gone toward defeating Democrats. Instead, the money has funded his political team and retribution agenda against Republicans who have crossed him.The current political climate favors Republicans as President Biden’s approval rating plumbs new lows. But nearly a dozen Republican strategists directly involved in fund-raising or overseeing campaigns have expressed concerns about how the fund-raising downturn might limit their party’s gains.Working in the party’s favor is that Wall Street billionaires and other industry titans have cut seven- and eight-figure checks to Republican super PACs, offsetting some of the party’s small-dollar struggles, which some attributed to inflation and others to deceptive tactics that are turning off supporters over time.“We’ve got to raise the money,” Senator Rick Scott of Florida, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, said repeatedly on Fox News on Friday when pressed about the 2022 landscape. “We get the money, we win.”For the Senate Republican committee, online fund-raising plunged by $6.7 million in the most recent quarter, to $11 million, from $17.7 million. Top Republican Senate candidates, even those whose fund-raising ticked up, are falling well behind their Democratic rivals in the cash race.Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia raised $12.3 million online last quarter.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesThe money gap is so pronounced that Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia, an endangered Democratic incumbent, raised more online last quarter — $12.3 million — than the combined WinRed quarterly hauls of the Republican Senate nominees or presumptive nominees in seven key contests: Georgia, Wisconsin, Florida, Nevada, Ohio, North Carolina and Pennsylvania.Money alone does not win political races and, for years, Republicans have grown accustomed to trailing Democrats in online fund-raising. Democratic donors, for instance, poured more than $200 million into losing Senate races in Kentucky and South Carolina last cycle — and neither contest ended up even close.Key Themes From the 2022 Midterm Elections So FarCard 1 of 5The state of the midterms. More

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      Trump’s Primary Losses Puncture His Invincibility

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      With many of Donald J. Trump’s endorsed candidates falling to defeat in recent primaries, some Republicans see an opening for a post-Trump candidate in 2024.Donald J. Trump had cast this year’s primaries as a moment to measure his power, endorsing candidates by the dozen as he sought to maintain an imprint on his party unlike any other past president.But after the first phase of the primary season concluded on Tuesday, a month in which a quarter of America’s states cast their ballots, the verdict has been clear: Mr. Trump’s aura of untouchability in Republican politics has been punctured.In more than five years — from when he became president in January 2017 until May 2022 — Mr. Trump had only ever seen voters reject a half-dozen of his choices in Republican primaries. But by the end of this month, that figure had more than doubled, with his biggest defeat coming on Tuesday when Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia thrashed a Trump-backed challenger by more than 50 percentage points. Three other Trump recruits challenging Kemp allies also went down to defeat.The mounting losses have emboldened Mr. Trump’s rivals inside the party to an extent not seen since early 2016 and increased the chances that, should he run again in 2024, he would face serious competition.“I think a non-Trump with an organized campaign would have a chance,” said Jack Kingston, a former Georgia congressman who advised the first Trump presidential campaign.Mr. Trump remains broadly popular among Republicans and has a political war chest well north of $100 million. But there has been a less visible sign of slippage: Mr. Trump’s vaunted digital fund-raising machine has begun to slow. An analysis by The New York Times shows that his average daily online contributions have declined every month for the last seven months that federal data is available.Mr. Trump has gone from raising an average of $324,633 per day in September 2021 on WinRed, the Republican donation-processing portal, to $202,185 in March 2022 — even as he has ramped up his political activities and profile.Those close to Mr. Trump — and even Republicans who aren’t — caution against misreading the significance of primary losses in which he himself was not on the ballot. Mr. Kemp, for instance, took pains ​​not to say a cross word about the former president to avoid alienating his loyal base.“To be the man, you have to beat the man,” said Jim Hobart, a Republican pollster with Public Opinion Strategies. “And until Trump either bows out of electoral politics, or is beaten by a Republican at the ballot box, his strength remains.”Rivals, including his own former vice president, Mike Pence, are gearing up for potential presidential runs, as he and others visit key early states like Iowa and ramp up their own fund-raising operations. Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has amassed a $100 million re-election war chest and is the talk of many donors, activists and voters interested in the future of Trumpism without Trump.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida speaking to the crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando, Fla., in February.Scott McIntyre for The New York Times“Donald Trump had four good years,” said Cole Muzio, president of the Frontline Policy Council, a conservative Christian group based in Georgia, who voted twice for Mr. Trump but is now looking for someone more “forward-looking.”“DeSantis is great about seeing where the left is going and playing on the field that they’re going to be on, rather than reacting to what happened a couple of years ago,” Mr. Muzio said, echoing the frustration that Mr. Trump continues to obsess about denying his 2020 election loss.After the Georgia Primary ElectionThe May 24 races were among the most consequential so far of the 2022 midterm cycle.Takeaways: G.O.P. voters rejected Donald Trump’s 2020 fixation, and Democrats backed a gun-control champion. Here’s what else we learned.Rebuking Trump: The ex-president picked losers up and down the ballot in Georgia, raising questions about the firmness of his grip on the G.O.P.G.O.P. Governor’s Race: Brian Kemp scored a landslide victory over David Perdue, delivering Mr. Trump his biggest setback of the 2022 primaries.2018 Rematch: Stacey Abrams, the Democratic nominee for governor, will again face Mr. Kemp — but in a vastly different political climate.Mr. Muzio, whose organization is hosting former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo as its fall gala headliner, spoke as he waited to hear Mr. Pence this week in Kennesaw, Ga., at a rally for Mr. Kemp — all names he included in the party’s “deep bench” of 2024 alternatives.Mr. Trump still remains the most coveted endorsement in his party, and he has boosted some big winners. Sarah Huckabee Sanders in Arkansas virtually cleared the field for governor with his support, and Representative Ted Budd in North Carolina defeated a past governor to win his party’s Senate nomination.Yet the difficult primary season has added to Mr. Trump’s personal anxieties about his standing, after he has sought to fashion himself as something of an old-school party boss in his post-presidency. He has told advisers he wants to declare his candidacy or possibly launch an exploratory committee this summer.Most of Mr. Trump’s advisers believe he should wait until after the midterm elections to announce a candidacy. Yet the sense among Republicans that Mr. Trump has lost political altitude is taking hold, including among some of those close to him.Taylor Budowich, a Trump spokesman, said the “undeniable reality” is that Republicans rely on Mr. Trump to “fuel Republican victories in 2022 and beyond.”“President Trump’s political operation continues to dominate American politics, raising more money and driving more victories than any other political organization — bar none,” Mr. Budowich said.Some Republican strategists have fixated on the fact that so many of Mr. Trump’s endorsees have landed about one-third of the vote — big winners (J.D. Vance in Ohio), losers (Jody Hice in Georgia, Janice McGeachin in Idaho and Charles Herbster in Nebraska) and those headed for a recount (Dr. Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania).One-third of the party is at once an unmatched base of unbending loyalists — and yet a cohort far from a majority.Notably, Mr. Trump’s share of what is raised overall among all Republicans online has also declined. Mr. Trump’s main fund-raising committee accounted for 19.7 percent of what was raised by Republican campaigns and committees on WinRed in the last four months of 2021, but just 14.1 percent of what was raised during the first three months of 2022. Some of that decrease is the result of other candidates on the ballot raising more this year.Still, only 10 times since July 2021 has Mr. Trump’s committee accounted for less than 10 percent of the money raised on WinRed during a single day — and nine of those instances came in March 2022, the last month data was available.The vocal opposition is no longer just confined to anti-Trump forces inside the party but is also evident in the pro-Trump mainstream. When a triumphant Mr. Kemp, whom Mr. Trump had targeted because he refused to go along with his efforts to subvert the 2020 presidential election, arrived in Nashville on Thursday to speak before a gathering of the Republican Governors Association, he received a standing ovation.Former Vice President Mike Pence, left, joined Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia during a Kemp campaign stop in Kennesaw, Ga.Nicole Craine for The New York Times“There is this temptation to engage in wish-casting in which, ‘This is the moment in which Trump is slipping!’” said Charlie Sykes, a conservative anti-Trump commentator. “On the other hand, what happened in Georgia was significant. He drew a bright red line — and voters just stampeded across it.”Understand the 2022 Midterm ElectionsCard 1 of 6Why are these midterms so important? More