The Federal Election Commission (FEC), which enforces campaign finance law in the United States, currently lists just 72 contribution entries for the Ron DeSantis for President committee and the Draft DeSantis 2024 Fund SuperPAC, from a mere 22 individual donors in the state of Iowa.
The gap between DeSantis and Donald Trump is gargantuan, with over 3,000 entries listed for the Donald Trump for President 2024 committee alone. Widening the search net on the FEC’s contributor database to include Team DeSantis 2024 and Jeff Roe’s Never Back Down PAC fails to yield any additional entries. .
While donors who contribute under $200 per cycle to federal political committees are not logged in the FEC database, and it is possible that a few remain to be added as of the time of publication, it is emphatically not the case that a full account of such small-dollar donors would improve DeSantis’s position relative to the former president.
In fact, the Floridian is in eighth place in small-dollar donations, behind not only Trump – who is very comfortably in first place – but also Vivek Ramaswamy, Chris Christie, Mike Pence, Tim Scott, Nikki Haley, and obscure CIA man Will Hurd.
All told, small-dollar donations account for 82 percent of Trump’s war chest but just 17 percent of DeSantis’s, increasing the Floridian’s reliance on the largesse of plutocrats like Muneer Satter, who has also bankrolled Paul Ryan, Jeb Bush, and even former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, a Democrat who works for President Joe Biden’s administration and previously served as Barack Obama’s chief of staff.
Will Upton contributed to this report.