Hello and welcome to the Americano podcast, a series of discussions about American politics

and the Trump presidency for the new Spectator USA website.

I'm joined today by Zach Christensen, who is publisher of Spectator USA and formerly CEO of a data analytics company called

Crowd Scout. And we're going to be discussing Trump's Warchest for 2020. Now, Zach, I'd like to talk about

the news today that Trump in the first quarter of 2019 has raised over $30 million for his 2020 campaign.

This is, to me, a staggering sum of money, particularly after all we've been hearing about

how much various Democratic candidates are raising. What do you think it says about Trump's

campaign and his chances for 2020? Well, I can tell you, I think, right away that what it says about this campaign is that they take

digital very seriously.

You know, they put their former digital director in charge of the entire campaign.

And I think what we're seeing is, you know, a payoff of that strategy of going all in on digital.

Obviously, the Trump campaign focuses very heavily on using Facebook for fundraising.

They have a great email operation. They're using things like text messaging now to raise dollars.

So they've really kind of gone, you know, really all in on this small dollar donor strategy,

which I think is really, really paying off for them. And what we also see, and just

from knowing what they're doing is that they really haven't even put into place their full high

dollar fundraising apparatus yet either or any of their bundling program, which sort of gets

those middle dollars in. And so everything we're seeing right now, I think, is a testament to

like how all in on digital they are and how all in they are on using things like analytics and different social media platforms.

This is not something we usually associate with the Republican Party.

I mean, for a long time or since Obama, really, the Democratic Party have been way ahead in terms of digital fundraising and online donations.

That's true. And I think on the Democratic side of the aisle,

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