From the NY Times:
"Former President Donald J. Trump’s performance in Tuesday night’s debate is likely to exacerbate the widening financial gap that he faces with Vice President Kamala Harris, who is now enjoying her eighth week of momentum with big and small donors alike.

Several large donors and fund-raising activists for Mr. Trump, along with their advisers, described the debate as a significant missed opportunity for him to firm up his support with voters and major contributors. At the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee in July, Mr. Trump’s financial backers were giddy to the point of almost overconfident. Now, his wealthy supporters are confronting the possibility that they may be dramatically outspent.

Debates are pivotal to both high- and low-dollar fund-raising. In interviews late on Tuesday and on Wednesday, while Mr. Trump’s backers echoed his complaint that the debate moderators had been unfair to him, many also said that he should have persisted regardless and that they believed he had lost the encounter.

Doug Deason, a Texas fund-raiser who watched the debate with his billionaire father, Darwin Deason, described the debate as “painful to watch” given his distaste for Ms. Harris and his frustration with the moderators and with Mr. Trump’s undisciplined performance.
“He just can’t sit and discuss policy,” Mr. Deason said. “He had many opportunities to expose her lies and failed on most.”

Keith Rabois, a venture capitalist who along with his husband has donated millions of dollars to pro-Trump groups, said he had fielded nervous messages from friends about Mr. Trump’s debate performance up until his closing statement, which Mr. Rabois considered strong.

“He got distracted and missed a lot of easy opportunities to put a nail in her coffin,” Mr. Rabois said. “He was not at his best.”

Mr. Rabois is hosting Senator JD Vance of Ohio, Mr. Trump’s running mate, for a fund-raiser on Thursday at his condo in New York City, and expects to raise more than $1 million for their campaign there. He said he expected Mr. Vance to “fix” Mr. Trump’s debate performance by more precisely prosecuting the anti-Harris case in his debate against her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, on Oct. 1.

Elon Musk, the wealthiest person in the world and one of Mr. Trump’s biggest backers, wrote on X that Ms. Harris “exceeded most people’s expectations tonight.” He did not defend Mr. Trump’s performance.
Mr. Trump suffered from a financial deficit through the spring against President Biden, then the presumptive Democratic nominee. He managed to overtake Mr. Biden’s resources by June 1. But since Ms. Harris replaced Mr. Biden at the top of the ticket, she has been on an eight-week fund-raising binge that has included almost tripling Mr. Trump’s financial tally in August.

The presidential debate on Tuesday energize her biggest donors, some of whom gathered across the country to spend the evening together, as well as the low-dollar givers who have overwhelmed her campaign.

Over $1 billion has been raised on ActBlue, the processing platform for donations to progressives, since Mr. Biden dropped out of the race on July 21, according to a New York Times analysis. And in the hours since the beginning of Tuesday’s debate, Democrats have raised $43 million on the platform. Tuesday was the best fund-raising day on ActBlue since the day that Mr. Walz was chosen as Ms. Harris’s running mate.

Campaign fund-raising hauls are driven in large part by marquee events like debates and nominating conventions. It is not clear if Mr. Trump has any big moments remaining on his calendar, with additional debates uncertain and especially now that his sentencing in his criminal case in Manhattan will not happen until after Election Day.

The Trump campaign did not immediately return a request for comment on its financial standing.

The cash advantage has allowed Ms. Harris to build a more omnipresent campaign. For instance, in July, the most recent month with spending records publicly available, Ms. Harris’s campaign committee spent more than triple what Mr. Trump’s campaign committee did — $81 million, compared with $24 million, with the split primarily manifesting itself in advertising.
And from now until Election Day, Ms. Harris and her allies are set to outspend Mr. Trump and his allies on television and radio by $131million, according to AdImpact, with spending advantages in every state. The concern for Republicans is that in a close election decided by small margins, Mr. Trump could find himself outspent in decisive ways.

Mr. Trump also has built a far smaller campaign operation than Ms. Harris, who claims to have more than 2,000 staff members on the payroll in coordination with Democratic Party groups. Mr. Trump’s field campaign, for instance, has substantially outsourced its canvassing work to outside groups such as Turning Point Action, the Faith & Freedom Coalition and America PAC, a super PAC that is expected to be largely funded by Mr. Musk.

Mr. Musk’s super PAC has recently been successfully persuading some major donors beyond its initial backers to support the group, according to two people briefed on the super PAC’s activities.

That matters because Mr. Trump has struggled to expand his reservoir of financial backers since his 2020 presidential run. Entering the homestretch of the presidential race, he remains extraordinarily reliant on just a few major donors who seem to be keeping him competitive in the world of paid media.

A coterie of billionaires, including Mr. Musk, Timothy Mellon, Miriam Adelson and Ike Perlmutter, is collectively putting in hundreds of millions of dollars into supporting Mr. Trump.
That, some Republicans noted, serves as something of a bulwark against any campaign missteps by Mr. Trump: Someone like Mr. Mellon can, with the stroke of a check, allow Republicans to close the advertising gap rather quickly.

Still, the Republican ticket’s travel schedule speaks to some of the financial pressure it is under: Mr. Trump, who did not headline many fund-raisers over the summer, frustrating some of his own major donors, is spending precious time after the debate appearing at finance events to refill his coffers, traveling to noncompetitive states like Utah and California for high-dollar events alongside his public rallies out West. Mr. Vance is headlining two events in New York on Thursday, including Mr. Rabois’s, and one in Louisiana on Friday. He will also raise money in Washington, D.C., next week.

On Wednesday, Republicans were invited to four events with Mr. Vance in Texas on Sept. 22 and Sept. 24, including an Austin fund-raiser thrown by Joe Lonsdale, an influential tech executive who is an ally of Mr. Musk, and another by Ray Washburne, a powerful Dallas developer who is a mainstay of the Republican fund-raising circuit.

Ms. Harris, by contrast, is not scheduled to appear at any finance events other than an event in Washington on Saturday. She has the advantage of celebrity surrogates to headline fund-raising events on her behalf — when the most precious resource she has is not money but her time."