Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis duke it out for donors — but it may not matter against Trump

Money can't buy them love.

As Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley jockey to be the top alternative to former President Donald Trump in the Republican presidential primaries, their campaigns will court a consortium of megadonors at a closed-door conference Friday in Dallas.

The American Opportunity Alliance is meeting as Trump continues to dominate the Republican field in national polling and state-by-state surveys, leaving his adversaries frustrated by the party establishment's inability to coalesce around a single rival. But neither the slumping DeSantis nor the surging Haley has been able to dispatch the other, and there's scant evidence to suggest Trump would lose in a head-to-head matchup with either of them.

And even winning the donor jackpot might not make much of a difference. Many Republicans have concluded that more cash would make little difference in efforts to topple Trump. Between his campaign and the super PAC Never Back Down, DeSantis has collected more than $150 million. After it spent $4 million testing anti-Trump ads in Iowa, the Win it Back PAC — which has ties to the conservative Club for Growth — found it could do limited damage, with "diminishing returns," to Trump.

"That is true at the presidential level, absolutely," said former Florida state Rep. Anthony Sabatini, who was a rare Florida Republican to endorse Trump over DeSantis. "In fact, [a focus on fundraising] can hurt them, because they spend a lot of time doing it when they could be meeting voters like” Vivek Ramaswamy, another GOP contender.

Neither Parker Poling, a top aide for the American Opportunity Alliance donor group, nor Posie Paoletta, an aide to AOA heavyweight Harlan Crow, responded to requests to discuss the conference. The DeSantis campaign declined to comment, and Haley's didn't reply.

DeSantis' pitch is expected to center on where non-Trump voters would land if other candidates exit the race, and the campaign's belief that Iowa polling is better for them than what the public numbers indicate.

“Basically the crux of their pitch will be essentially while Nikki is having her moment, mathematically no way she can win," said a Republican with direct knowledge of the campaign's argument. "If Ron DeSantis were to leave the race right now, all his voters would go to Trump, and it would be over. If Nikki or Christie or Pence were to leave, DeSantis takes a significant portion and enough to consolidate behind Trump."

"They will also say the polling gap is not what you are seeing on the ground," the person added. "Polling in Iowa not what you are seeing publicly.”

As of last week, DeSantis' campaign had just $5 million in the bank for the primaries, a small number for someone who entered the race in May with expectations that he would be the field's best fundraiser by far. A DeSantis donor said it's a "huge problem." Haley's campaign reported having $9 million available for primary season spending.

“When Trump is involved, nothing is normal, so I think it’s totally correct that money matters less when it comes to him,” said Shiree Verdone, who was a Trump campaign co-chair in Arizona in 2016 and 2020 but hasn't backed a specific candidate in 2024. “Whether it’s more indictments or the money stuff, Trump just always crushes it.

“I have talked to a lot of donors, some who were upset that Trump got involved in so many 2022 primaries that ultimately lost in the general election, and many of them are shifting back to Trump,” she added. “Many were solidly looking at DeSantis — not anymore.”

Haley has quickly ascended through the primary field after two well-received debate performances. As a result, she is getting new attention as potentially the most viable alternative to Trump, a designation DeSantis once had to himself.

The fact that DeSantis has to compete with Haley for the favor of donors is a sign of both the change in their relative standing in the field and his failure to turn the race into the one-on-one matchup with Trump his campaign has long insisted it is.

As her stock rises, Haley is getting more interest from anti-Trump donors, as evidenced by her being just one of two candidates whose campaigns were summoned to Dallas for the donor confab even though a crowded primary field remains. The dynamic was also on full display at a summit GOP Sen. Mitt Romney led in Utah this week, an event attended by more than 200 influential donors who generally aren't Trump supporters.

“Right now I am at the Romney conference in Utah,” an attendee said Tuesday from the closed-door event at Park City’s Stein Eriksen Lodge. “Nikki is hanging out with Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney. It will be helpful for her on the donor front but will go over like a lead balloon with any MAGA-friendly voters.”

Trump did not name Haley, but he took to Truth Social to trash the event.

"I understand Candidates that are losing by 57 to 70 Points are getting together with RINO Paul RINO, Mitt 'The Loser' Romney, Bill 'No Guts or Talent' Barr, and some broken political 'investors' that will soon come to me, as most others already have," he wrote.

DeSantis didn't go to the event, which presidential candidates Chris Christie, Mike Pence and Doug Burgum also attended.

Some political experts see that sort of money chase as futile compared to the grasp Trump continues to hold over the Republican base.

"It doesn't matter where they meet, how often they meet or which candidate they parade in front of them — they will not move the needle on Donald Trump, because this is not from the base," said former Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele, who is a vocal Trump critic. "This is the very thing the base is repelled by, and that is the moneyed interests in the party."

Current television spending numbers back up the idea that when it comes to beating Trump, money is not the problem.

Organizations backing South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, including his campaign and an affiliated super PAC, have spent $51 million so far on buying and reserving airtime — roughly one-third of all presidential campaign spending so far during the 2024 cycle.

The second biggest spenders are groups backing DeSantis that have spent about $36.5 million, or about 20% of the total pie. Trump-aligned groups have spent just under $30 million, while a constellation of Haley-aligned groups comes in fourth in total TV spending with $23 million, or 13% of the total.

“Are you going to tell me pro-DeSantis and pro-Haley groups can combine and make a bigger dent,” a Republican operative closely tracking spending said. “It has not happened yet.”

The question for anti-Trump donors is less whether they can anoint a nominee with money than whether one of the other candidates has what it takes to mount the kind of challenge that is worth spending on.

Larry Hogan, a Republican former governor of Maryland who hasn't ruled out a third-party bid for the presidency, said Tuesday that he is still trying to help defeat Trump in the GOP primary campaign and that he sees Haley as the better pick to do that.

DeSantis is "barely on life support" after he fell from a clear second place, Hogan said at a Bloomberg News forum. "If I were giving advice to those donors ... Nikki Haley, I think, has a stronger chance of being our nominee."

When Win It Back PAC tested six ads in Iowa, it found that certain messages could pull down Trump's numbers — but not nearly enough to make up the 30-point gap between him and DeSantis in Iowa. The first three ads were more effective than the last three, Win It Back President David McIntosh wrote in a memo to donors that was first published by The New York Times.

For now, the group is waiting — along with other Republicans — to see whether any rival emerges as a legitimate threat to Trump's nomination.

"While we successfully identified messaging and a series of ads that lowered President Trump's support across our testing and polls, none of the alternative candidates have consolidated the non-Trump vote yet," McIntosh wrote. "We plan to continue developing and testing ads to deploy when there are signs of consolidation."

Former Wisconsin Republican Party Chair Andrew Hitt said there are a few underlying dynamics that explain why beating Trump is more than a money problem. For starters, he said, Trump does not need to "spend much money to raise as much."

"He is something I am not sure we have ever seen," he said. "And we keep scratching our heads as to how he pulls it off, but the reality is he does. He sucks all the air out of every room and every living room."

Hitt said campaigns are also not spending as efficiently as they could, which leads to a higher burn rate and less impactful results.

"They still seem to spend like how we consumed information two decades ago," he said. "So it's hard to catch up when you have old thinking, like traditional spending, against something new like Trump."

There are examples from past Republican primary campaigns in which candidates without financial advantages secured the nominations, or at least were able to win a few early nominating contests.

"Santorum didn't have money; neither did Huckabee. They won Iowa," said Alex Stroman, the former executive director of the South Carolina Republican Party, referring to Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee, who ran against Trump for the nomination in 2016.

John McCain "was left for dead and on fumes, and he became the nominee" in 2008, he said.

"The primary process," he added, "rarely rewarded the highest fundraisers."

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com