Trump's cash on hand falls short to Biden's: FEC filings

Yahoo Finance's Rick Newman joins Akiko Fujita to discuss the latest FEC filings that show President Trump falling behind Joe Biden in cash on hand in the final stretch before the election.

Video Transcript

AKIKO FUJITA: We've got less than two weeks to go until the presidential election. Both campaigns going all out in their ad spend, but some new numbers point to potential financial troubles for the president's re-election bid. Let's bring in Rick Newman, who has been tracking those numbers for us.

Rick, you know, you have-- we've been talking a lot about how Joe Biden has raised record numbers in the last several weeks. But where do things stand for President Trump? And how troubling is it, just given how close we are to the election?

RICK NEWMAN: He's way behind Biden. And the latest figures just reported by "The New York Times" show Trump more than $100 million before Biden-- excuse me, behind Biden-- in monthly fundraising. And this obviously comes at a terrible time.

You know, Trump was way ahead, going back about six months, when Biden had just kind of sewn up the Democratic nomination. Trump had raised more than a billion dollars. He wasn't competing with anybody for the nomination. And the Biden campaign had almost nothing.

And what has happened since then is, President Trump has really been a goldmine for Democrats running against him. So there's just a lot of enthusiasm among big donors and small donors both on the Democratic side to defeat President Trump. And the money has just come pouring in.

And I think you're also-- I think Trump's wan fundraising numbers also indicate a belief among some donors that he's just bound to lose. Because what happens in the late stages is, if you seem like a sinking ship, nobody really wants to give you money.

And if you seem like you really might be sailing ahead, well, of course, everybody wants to get on board and make donations, you know, for many reasons. But one of them might be you want to side with the-- you want to be on the winning side, especially based on what comes next.

AKIKO FUJITA: Rick, when you look at this huge surge in funds that Joe Biden has gotten over the last several weeks, what's been the big catalyst? Has it been about the Supreme Court? Has it been about the first debate and the performance of the president then? What do you think has led to this huge surge?

RICK NEWMAN: It seems like it's been almost all of those things and probably many others. Honestly, it just seems like people are spending money to beat Trump. So we know that when the former Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died, there was a huge surge in Democratic fundraising. And much of the small donor fundraising goes through the ActBlue fundraising organization. They set records in terms of fundraising.

But it just seems to be coming into Biden from all sides. And, you know, Biden had-- we should remind everybody, Biden has never been a fantastic campaigner. I mean, he had two prior presidential runs that went essentially nowhere. He wasn't the Dynamo back then, and that was in 1998 and 2008.

But I think because of the fact-- I really think it's because he's running against Trump. And this just indicates-- you know, everybody talks about the enthusiasm gap in terms of Trump voters who show up for rallies and seem so much more fired up than Biden supporters.

But there's a different type of enthusiasm gap in the fundraising. And Democrats are showing, and probably some independents and even some Republicans are showing, they're very enthused about at least giving a little bit of money to Biden so that he can beat Trump.