Nikki Haley has cornered a donor market in the GOP primaries — but she needs much more

New data shows Nikki Haley's 2024 presidential campaign is raking in online donations from areas with higher concentrations of individuals with college degrees.

The financial part of the Republican presidential race has played out a lot like the rest of it: There has been Donald Trump, and then, well behind, there has been everyone else.

But six months of individual contribution data from the Republican Party’s main online donor platform shows how and where former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley has built up her support in the Republican primaries: in a patchwork of more well-off and well-educated neighborhoods around the country, the type of places that recoiled against Trump during his presidency.

Haley’s appeal to donors has been steadily growing for months, and her campaign says she raised almost as much in January as in the entire previous quarter. The problem is that the available donor data also illustrates the limits to Haley’s appeal, even if the uptick in donations appears to be more than enough to keep a presidential campaign operating.

Trump, long an online fundraising juggernaut who came into the 2024 campaign with a big head start on his competitors, pulled in more digital donors than Haley in a whopping 24,545 ZIP codes in the second half of 2023, according to an NBC News analysis of campaign finance data filed by WinRed, the donation platform. Haley had more online donors in 1,183 ZIP codes. (This analysis compared donations to the Trump campaign and his main joint fundraising committee against donations to the Haley campaign and her main joint fundraising committee.)

Not only is there a huge gulf between those numbers, but a gaping demographic difference between those places tells a clear story about the primary campaign.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/haley-online-donors-gop-primary-trump-rcna136916

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