Bush’s Campaign Trails Three Republican Rivals in 2016 Money Race

Nine months after en­ter­ing the 2016 stage as a fun­drais­ing be­hemoth, Jeb Bush finds him­self in the fi­nal, cru­cial months be­fore ac­tu­al vot­ing be­gins with less money in the bank than three GOP rivals.

The former Flor­ida gov­ernor raised $13.4 mil­lion between Ju­ly 1 and Sept. 30—just $2 mil­lion more than he raised in the fi­nal two weeks of June fol­low­ing his form­al entry in­to the race. The haul left him $10.3 mil­lion head­ing in­to Oc­to­ber.

Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, Sen. Marco Ru­bio of Flor­ida, and re­tired neurosur­geon Ben Car­son all began the fourth quarter with more in the bank. Cruz had $13.8 mil­lion, Car­son had $11.2 mil­lion, and Ru­bio had $11 mil­lion, ac­cord­ing to Fed­er­al Elec­tion Com­mis­sion re­ports filed Thursday.

“This is par­tic­u­larly note­worthy giv­en the depth of the cur­rent field,” Bush cam­paign man­ager Danny Diaz said in a state­ment. “We knew from the start this was go­ing to be a hard-fought and close race, but few could have an­ti­cip­ated just how volat­ile this field would be.”

These fig­ures do not re­flect the dol­lars col­lec­ted by su­per PACs sup­port­ing the can­did­ates. Among those, the Right to Rise com­mit­tee sup­port­ing Bush had raised $103 mil­lion in the first half of the year, far more than the group sup­port­ing Ru­bio and the vari­ous groups back­ing Cruz. How much each of these groups has today is un­avail­able to the pub­lic, and won’t be un­til the next FEC fil­ing dead­line for su­per PACs on Jan. 31, 2016—the day be­fore the Iowa caucuses.

Right to Rise, however, an­nounced Thursday that it is re­serving $16.8 mil­lion in TV ads in states that vote March 1, in­clud­ing Geor­gia, Texas, Vir­gin­ia, and Michigan.

Also not covered by Thursday’s fil­ings is spend­ing by a secret-money polit­ic­al group, Con­ser­vat­ive Solu­tions Pro­ject, which has been run­ning mil­lions of dol­lars in ads prais­ing Ru­bio for months in the early-vot­ing states. The donors pay­ing for those ads nev­er have to be re­vealed, and how much the group ends up spend­ing doesn’t have to dis­closed un­til the spring of 2017—months after the next pres­id­ent has taken of­fice.

Set­ting aside the out­side groups, that Bush’s ac­tu­al cam­paign has been matched, let alone sur­passed, by oth­er can­did­ates speaks to the trouble he has had all sum­mer and in­to the fall gain­ing trac­tion in polling. Bush cur­rently stands in single di­gits na­tion­ally, des­pite hav­ing the best Re­pub­lic­an fun­drais­ing op­er­a­tion in the coun­try—ori­gin­ally built for his fath­er’s 1980 pres­id­en­tial run, and then kept up­dated through five ad­di­tion­al na­tion­al races for his fath­er and older broth­er.

That abil­ity to raise money quickly, com­bined with Bush’s view that his cam­paign from the start had to be equipped to run a suc­cess­ful gen­er­al-elec­tion race to take on pre­sumed Demo­crat­ic nom­in­ee Hil­lary Clin­ton, led him to build a sprawl­ing op­er­a­tion far lar­ger than his GOP rivals.

In the three months end­ing Sept. 30, Bush’s cam­paign spent $2.4 mil­lion pay­ing 133 dif­fer­ent staffers. Ru­bio, in con­trast, paid 44 in­di­vidu­als a total of $591,500, and Cruz paid 36 people a total of $563,000.

(Car­son, mean­while, paid the ma­jor­ity of what he raised—$11.6 mil­lion—to the dir­ect-mail and email mar­ket­ing com­pan­ies that brought the money in. His un­con­ven­tion­al cam­paign spent just $169,000 on staff.)

The Bush cam­paign also spent $922,000 on chartered air­planes—al­though the vast ma­jor­ity of that came in Ju­ly and early Au­gust, be­fore the cam­paign star­ted cut­ting back on ex­penses to match smal­ler ex­pec­ted fun­drais­ing totals.