Why Can’t Donald Trump Make A Third Party Run?

Donald Trump in Council Bluffs, Iowa (image courtesy Matt Johnson, available under a Creative Commons BY license)
Donald Trump in Council Bluffs, Iowa (image courtesy Matt Johnson, available under a Creative Commons BY license)

For some time, Donald Trump has hinted that if he doesn’t get the Republican nomination for president, he’ll launch a third party bid to buy the presidency. That scenario has been a right-wing nightmare, and a dream come true for many liberals. After all, the conventional wisdom is that if Trump bolts, only a complete meltdown would deny the Democrats the White House. Well, it turns out that Trump was just blowing smoke. It turns out that he could not possibly make a third party run because financially, he cannot.

A lot of us believed that Trump was more than wealthy enough to self-finance his campaign. That’s what had a lot of GOP insiders quaking in their boots at the thought of him bolting the party. However, Megan McArdle of Bloomberg News found something completely different when she took a peek at the Personal Financial Disclosure form Trump filed with the Federal Election Commission when he launched his presidential bid last summer. She noticed that Trump claims $302 million in cash, stocks, and bonds.

But wait a minute. Trump claims to be worth more than $10 billion, while Forbes pegs him at a slightly more modest $4.5 billion. What is beyond dispute is that Trump is one of the richest men in the world. But much of that wealth is tied up in his vast real estate holdings. Considering that both parties spent at or close to a billion dollars each in 2012, McArdle thinks that Trump won’t be able to self-finance a third party presidential campaign on cash and stock alone.

It turns out that Trump’s fearsome image is built mostly on sand. He has raised a grand total of $25 million–and all but $8 million has come from his own pocket. It is by far the lowest total of any major-party candidate still in the field. More tellingly, Trump has only raised $5 million in small contributions. By comparison, the only major candidates to have raised less from small donors are Marco Rubio and John Kasich–and their campaigns are on life support.

It’s very likely that many of Trump’s supporters aren’t opening their wallets because they think he’s self-financing, so he doesn’t need their money. But McArdle thinks that Trump’s inability to attract small donors doesn’t bode well for a potential third party campaign. Trump’s bare-bones approach to campaigning has gotten him pretty far in the primary–for instance, he sprinted to victory in Tennessee despite having very little organization to speak of in the Volunteer State. However, it simply won’t work in a general election. Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders will have one of the most formidable ground operations in American politics behind them–and all of the free airtime in the world wouldn’t be enough for Trump to overcome it.

McArdle thinks that if Trump were to make a third party run, he could borrow against his real estate interests and get a billion dollars at one stroke. That would be more than enough to buy airtime and hire more staff. But that assumes the bankers are willing to take a chance on a guy who has already declared bankruptcy five times in the last quarter-century–most recently in 2014. There’s another factor to consider as well–he’s currently being sued for fraudulent practices at his real estate education program, Trump University. Even the most lenient banker would not be willing to lend money to a presidential candidate who is facing a massive lawsuit.

Last week, I suspected that Trump was incompetent at best and a fraud at worst. After this, I have to suspect it’s a little of both. He knew he didn’t have nearly enough money to self-finance a third party bid, but he wasn’t willing to do the legwork necessary to make up the difference. Sounds like a guy who is the very definition of the entitled one-percenter. He expected to have the presidency handed to him–and is learning the hard way that it won’t happen, whether or not he runs as a Republican.

Darrell is a 30-something graduate of the University of North Carolina who considers himself a journalist of the old school. An attempt to turn him into a member of the religious right in college only succeeded in turning him into the religious right's worst nightmare--a charismatic Christian who is an unapologetic liberal. His desire to stand up for those who have been scared into silence only increased when he survived an abusive three-year marriage. You may know him on Daily Kos as Christian Dem in NC. Follow him on Twitter @DarrellLucus or connect with him on Facebook. Click here to buy Darrell a Mello Yello.