Earlier this month, Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley’s campaign boasted the former South Carolina governor had outraised former President Donald Trump, that Haley was a fundraising “force to be reckoned with.”
Turns out the $11 million Haley was said to have raised didn’t quite pan out.
As CBS News reports, Haley’s campaign raised $3.3 million in contributions, with another $1.8 million transferred from her joint fundraising committee. Haley’s first financial disclosure forms since announcing her presidential aspirations in February, show a total of $5.1 million in receipts.
Haley received about $8.3 million between all of her campaign fundraising entities — not the $11 million the campaign triumphantly announced, her campaign filings with the Federal Election Commission show.
“Her campaign told CBS News that it stands firm on the dollar figure it originally reported, claiming there are multiple entities allowed to fundraise in a political campaign, and it’s standard procedure in other campaigns to consolidate fundraising figures,” the news outlet reported. “But Haley’s campaign did not address the $2.7 million it appears to have double-counted in arriving at its $11 million total.”
Betsy Ankney, Haley’s campaign manager, earlier this month, told Fox News that in just six weeks, the former governor’s “massive fundraising and active retail campaigning in early voting states makes her a force to be reckoned with.”
The campaign bragged that the $11 million raised in her first six weeks on the campaign trail is more than the $9.5 million top Trump raised in his first quarter following his mid-November announcement through the end of 2022, and “more than was raised by nearly all 2016 Republican presidential candidates in their first quarters.”
Trump has seen a surge in campaign contributions since his indictment on March 30 and his subsequent arrest in Manhattan on multiple counts of felony fraud. The charge relates to hush-money payments made before the 2016 presidential election to cover up an alleged affair with porn star Stormy Daniels, in a prosecution driven by a highly partisan Democrat district attorney.
The former president, as of earlier this week, had raised north of $15 million since the unprecedented indictment, according to his campaign. The vast majority of those campaign contributions — nearly 98 percent — came from small donations of $200 or less, including 24 percent from fist-time contributors to Trump. Over the first quarter, the campaign took in nearly $14.5 million in receipts, according to FEC documents.
Ohio entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy raised more than $11.4 million in the first quarter, much of it — $10.5 million coming from the multi-millionaire’s personal fortune. The 37-year-old political outsider, the youngest candidate in the chase for the GOP presidential nomination, raised another 1.16 million in individual contributions, according to his filing with the Federal Election Commission. Ramaswamy, like Haley, declared his candidacy in February.
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M.D. Kittle is the National Political Editor for The Star News Network.
Photo “Nikki Haley” by Nikki Haley.
