Trump Campaign Assumed Easy Georgia Win And Appears to Have Left Millions Unspent
WASHINGTON – The campaign of President Donald Trump was so focused on not overspending that it turned down a $3 million request to help get out the vote in Georgia, and it appears to have headed into election night with tens of millions of dollars left unspent in the bank.
“Trying not to win, I guess,” said one top Republican fundraiser who spoke to HuffPost on condition of anonymity. The fundraiser added that campaign manager Bill Stepien turned down spending extra money in Georgia, believing Trump would win there comfortably, and seemed overly concerned about the budget. “Bill was hellbent to not wind up in debt, but what the fuck?”
Trump wound up losing Georgia by 12,000 votes to Democrat Joe Biden, now the president-elect. It was the first time since 1992 that a Democratic presidential candidate won the state.
The Trump campaign denied it left money unspent. “We didn’t have millions of uncommitted dollars in the bank on Election Day, and anyone who says otherwise has no idea what the situation was,” deputy campaign manager Justin Clark said. “Every dollar we had was matched to an outstanding expense.”
Stepien, meanwhile, called the allegation he rejected the get-out-the-vote request “false,” and another top campaign official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said no such request was made.
“Door-knocking funding is generally [a Republican National Committee] expenditure, not the campaign. But when the RNC asked for assistance for that kind of thing, the campaign agreed every time. The RNC never communicated to the campaign that there was a request for Georgia door-knocking money,” the official said.
Determining precisely when money was available to the campaign is impossible using Federal Election Commission filings because so much of Trump’s money came from small-dollar donors. Their contributions are listed in the aggregate and not broken out by amount and date until a donor’s cumulative total reaches a $200...