Rand Paul’s Campaign Is Experiencing a Money Bomb. The Bad Kind.

His dad’s campaign hauled in more money in one day than the current GOP contender raised in three months.

Jacquelyn Martin/AP

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In 2008 and 2012, Ron Paul became famous for his “money bombs”—internet-fueled fundraising frenzies during which his rabid followers poured millions of dollars into his campaign coffers. But his son’s presidential campaign may be best remembered for a money bomb of another sort. Rand Paul’s campaign confirmed on Thursday that it had raised just $2.5 million over the past three months. To put that in perspective, his dad’s campaign once raised $6 million in one day.

The news comes at a particularly awkward moment for Paul. Earlier this week, Donald Trump taunted the Kentucky senator online, predicting on Twitter that he would be the next GOP hopeful to drop out of the race. Paul laughed off the taunt, calling Trump a clown, but his campaign’s lackluster fundraising is difficult to spin.

Sergio Gor, Paul’s spokesman, said the fundraising situation had actually improved since the most recent GOP debate on September 16. “A key takeaway is that we raised $750,000 in just the last two weeks,” Gor said. “With $2 million cash on hand, our campaign is in for the long haul.”

The cash on hand is not a small thing. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker dropped out of the race last month after his campaign came close to going broke and campaign contractors began complaining they hadn’t been paid. Still, an analysis of the campaign’s expenditures suggests that if Paul’s 2016 campaign doesn’t pick up the pace of its fundraising, it could find itself in a similar position.

At the end of June, the campaign reported it had $4.1 million in cash on hand. If the campaign currently has only $2 million in the bank, even with $2.5 million in new money over the last three months, that means the campaign still spent $4.6 million since July 1. That translates to the campaign spending about $51,000 a day, but raising only about $27,000. If the campaign did raise $750,000 since the second GOP debate, it would be at a rate of $50,000 a day, still shy of the daily burn rate.

Without substantially improving fundraising numbers, the campaign may run out of cash well before the end of the next quarter.

The low numbers come on the heels of other bad fundraising news for Paul. On Tuesday, the head of a libertarian-themed super-PAC that had previously thrown its support behind Paul announced that the group had decided to stop, at least temporarily, spending or raising money on the candidate’s behalf. Another super-PAC, endorsed by Paul explicitly, took a blow in August when two of its organizers were indicted on campaign finance charges stemming from their work on Ron Paul’s 2012 campaign.

One bright spot for the 2016 Paul presidential campaign is that a third super-PAC, Concerned American Voters, is footing the bill for a staff of field canvassers on the job in Iowa. Still, if Paul’s fundraising doesn’t improve, and fast, Trump’s prediction might prove right.

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Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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