The Elon Musk-led group driving millions to Donald Trump’s White House bid

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Donald Trump has been increasingly reliant on fundraising groups fuelled by megadonors, such as Elon Musk’s America Pac, to support his White House bid.

The Tesla chief himself has given nearly $75mn to help Trump, and Musk’s America Pac already spent more than $96mn to help the former president, according to OpenSecrets. [Free to read]

Other top America Pac donors include billionaire tech entrepreneurs Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss; early Tesla investor Antonio Gracias; Palantir Technologies co-founder Joe Lonsdale; Sequoia partner Shaun Maguire; and Doug Leone, a former managing partner at the firm.

Since Musk endorsed Trump in July the X owner cast the election as his final hope for the country’s democracy and has claimed illegal immigrants will take over the US if Harris wins.

In Musk’s effort to flip the critical battleground state of Pennsylvania into the Republican column, he’s kicked off “a series of talks” throughout the state, requiring that attendees sign a petition supporting free speech and the right to bear arms.

America Pac has also hired canvassers in Pennsylvania and Michigan, with its website claiming pay starts at $30 an hour. The group says it will offer $47 — in reference to the next president being the 47th — for each registered voter that signs its petition.

Pro-Trump groups have raised $1.4bn this election cycle — with almost half coming from super Pacs, which can raise unlimited contributions from individuals — according to the latest financial disclosures.

Just three individuals — Musk, philanthropist Miriam Adelson and shipping supplies magnate Dick Uihlein — contributed a total of $220mn in the third quarter as Trump tries to catch up with Kamala Harris in the money race. In addition to Musk’s $75mn for America Pac, Adelson donated $95mn to Preserve America, and Uihlein gave about $49mn to Restoration Pac.

Scroll down to our data section for more of the latest fundraising trends. You can expect more on super Pac money when groups file their reports this Sunday.

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Behind the scenes

The vice-president continued her media blitz on Fox News last night, hitting the airwaves in an effort to regain momentum against Trump.

This media strategy, which has been designed to make direct appeals to specific demographics, is a gamble to reach a wider pool of voters as some top Democrats worry she’s struggling to take on her rival.

In Harris’s Fox appearance last night — her first on the conservative cable channel — she made an appeal to centrists and anti-Trump Republicans, pledging a break from Biden.

On Tuesday, she was interviewed by Charlamagne tha God, a radio host whose show is popular among young Black people. There’s even talk that she could sit down with controversial podcaster Joe Rogan, who has a huge reach among young men.

As Matt Bennett, co-founder of centrist Democratic think-tank Third Way, told the FT’s Lauren Fedor:

This effort is aimed at people who haven’t decided to vote, or for whom to vote, and those are the people that matter.

It is definitely risky but I think it is smart . . . Charlamagne is risky. [Fox News’s] Bret Baier is risky. But taking risks is important at this stage. She can’t run like she’s ahead because she is not.

Harris was leading Trump by 2.3 percentage points nationally, according to the FT’s poll tracker, a statistical dead heat.

Datapoint

Tuesday’s deadline for filing political donations from the past three months has given us a fresh look at campaign balance sheets, and the data shows that Harris outraised Trump by $500mn in the third quarter.

Harris’s campaign and affiliated groups raked in $870mn from July to September, compared with Trump’s $366mn, as Democratic supporters were galvanised by the change at the top of their ticket.

The 2024 Democratic ticket is set to pull in more than Biden and Harris did in 2020. Political groups supporting Harris and Biden have received $1.68bn this year, about as much as the total that groups raised for the president’s run four years ago.

Harris is also on track to rack up more small donors — those giving $200 or less — than Biden did in 2020. She received more than 600,000 donations on each of the first two days of her candidacy — more than Biden got on any single day of the 2020 campaign. She earned another 500,000 contributions on the day she named Tim Walz as her running mate, and a further 400,000 when she officially accepted the Democratic nomination in August.

Meanwhile, Trump’s support among small donors is weakening: about 300,000 people donated in the three days after the Butler assassination attempt, compared with the 1mn in the three-day period after his hush-money trial conviction. And he had about 300,000 fewer small-dollar donations at the end of the third quarter than he did at the same point in the 2020 campaign.

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