Clinton campaign manager to donors: "Trump could outraise us"
Despite Hillary Clinton's growing lead in national polls, top Clinton campaign aides are urging their top donors not to get complacent--and warning high-level donors in a memo Monday that if they don't step up, Clinton could be outraised by Donald Trump.
"Donald Trump also had his best fundraising month of the campaign, raising $80 million," campaign manager Robby Mook wrote in the memo, circulated to donors Monday. "This was far more than anyone expected -- and should be a wake up call to all Hillary supporters."
Mook outlines in the memo, obtained by CBS News, the reasons to fear Trump's growing ability to raise cash--in large part because he's only just begun building his grassroots donor base and still has the ability to self-fund if necessary. The contents of Mook's memo were first reported by Politico.
"We have to take seriously the threat that Donald Trump could outraise us," Mook wrote. "While we have been working for more than a year to build and grow our grassroots support, Trump only recently started earnestly fundraising from small donors and has clearly seen significant growth in the past month."
Clinton's campaign has been raising cash at a steady clip since she entered the race in April 2015, bringing in a total of $469 million so far--compared with Trump, who just began raising money in earnest earlier this summer. That gap was apparent in both campaigns' May fundraising figures: Clinton had $42 million on hand at the end of that month, while Trump had just $1.3 million.
Since he's begun actively raising money, however, Trump is closing the gap: in July, Clinton's campaign raised $90 million to Trump's $80 million.
In the memo, Mook noted that Clinton's campaign is still falling behind on another important fundraising metric as well -- they're about $50 million behind the $520 million President Obama's campaign had raised by this point in the 2012 race.
"Falling short of the resources raised in 2012 will require us to scale back from the investments President Obama's campaign made in organizing, data and other critical tools," he wrote.
Although Clinton has opened up significant high single-digit or low double-digit leads in national polls since the Democratic convention, Mook cautioned donors against getting too confident--or thinking the campaign's infrastructure investments can or should be scaled back ahead of Election Day as a result. The race is still tight in key battleground states, he noted.
"While our convention has undoubtedly helped us clarify the choice for voters in the election, we fully expect the polls to tighten again," he wrote. "It is therefore critical that we keep executing our strategy in order to lock our support in."
"None of us wants to wake up on November 9th wondering what more we could have done to prevent a Trump presidency," the memo concludes. "The threat to our country and the world is too great to leave any room for second-guessing ourselves."