GOP donors seek an alternative to Trump

Republican presidential candidates are still seeking the support of donors of all sizes. Former President Donald Trump is leading in the polls and "dominates" small donations according to Yahoo Finance Senior Columnist Rick Newman. The largest GOP donors continue to search for an alternative to the former president as Newman states, “the GOP field is very fragmented."

Video Transcript

- The campaign trail is heating up with all major Republican candidates out on the road trying to gather support. A new report from Bloomberg suggests the winner of the primaries may not be as clear cut as it was in the last presidential election season. Big Republican donors might be seeking an alternative to the former president, but they haven't found a singular candidate that they want. Let's bring in Yahoo Finance's Rick Newman to discuss more. Hi, Rick. So who is it?

RICK NEWMAN: We don't know. So this resembles 2016 on the Republican-- on the Republican side, which is to say big donors are split. Some of them are going to Trump, but others are grabbing some of those big donors.

So that would be Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, also the South Carolina Senator Tim Scott. He's getting some big donors. And then when you look at the small donors, Trump dominates. So those are people who give-- it could be 20 bucks, it could be 40 bucks. They don't hit the limit. So the Trump can go back to them.

And I guess that's not surprising. Because Trump has had basically seven or eight years at this point to develop that network of small donors and anybody who has ever once signed up for a Trump campaign email, as I have so that I can monitor what they're saying, you just get these Trump emails relentlessly. Every time there's some twist in one of the legal cases against Trump, he sends out an email.

The Democrats are prosecuting me. Send $20. And it seems to work. So the GOP field is very fragmented at this point. Trump is leading in the polls. But because of his unique legal problems, there seems to be some likelihood that that does not automatically make him the guy who will challenge President Biden next year.

- Is there anything that would derail that scenario of him being the nominee?

RICK NEWMAN: Sure. He could get convicted of felonies. He could go to prison. And it's possible that he's just going to get so bogged down with these criminal cases. I mean, we've got federal cases against Trump. There's probably going to be-- there probably charges coming in Georgia.

There's the New York City case. He could end up so bogged down with all this prosecutions that he has to deal with that he just is not an effective campaigner. And he basically campaigns from a bunker in Mar-a-Lago. So there's nothing inevitable about Trump being the nominee given how up in the air this whole thing is.

- And there's nothing inevitable about him not being the nominee if we recall how 2016 went as well. Because he wasn't clear initially. All right. We will obviously continue to cover this. Rick Newman, thank you so much.