Pro-Trump committees have already spent more than 8 times what his whole campaign did in 2016

Trump 2020.
(Image credit: Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)

President Trump's very open wallet doesn't exactly seem to be paying off.

So far in this campaign, pro-Trump committees have spent a whopping $531 million on his 2020 re-election campaign, The Washington Post reports. That's more than eight times what Trump's campaign spent by the time he effectively secured the GOP nomination in 2016, but in polls matching him up with Democratic contenders, he's still falling behind.

Trump has had no trouble raking in funding throughout the 2020 race, raising a combined $125 million in tandem with the Republican National Committee in the third fundraising quarter. For comparison, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) topped the Democrats with $25.3 million that quarter. That haul has allowed Trump to pour dollars into Democratic attack ads, with committees spending $10 million on them already, per the Post. Trump is also increasing his consulting power, hiring just 19 consultants to work on his campaign in 2016 but employing more than 200 today.

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But all that spending doesn't mean Trump will be able to secure the swing states he scored last time around. A national Fox News poll in August put former Vice President Joe Biden, Sanders, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), and Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) over Trump by at least six points each, while a Quinnipiac University poll in October maintained Biden, Sanders and Warren's success.

Biden has meanwhile been beating Trump in Texas since April of this year, per a poll, while a September poll showed five other Democrats were topping Trump as well. Of course, if there's anything we learned in 2016, it's that polls involving Trump aren't always on target.

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Kathryn Krawczyk

Kathryn is a graduate of Syracuse University, with degrees in magazine journalism and information technology, along with hours to earn another degree after working at SU's independent paper The Daily Orange. She's currently recovering from a horse addiction while living in New York City, and likes to share her extremely dry sense of humor on Twitter.