Republicans who oppose Donald Trump could be helping him win the party's presidential nomination by spreading their donations to his various rivals instead of coalescing around a single challenger, according to a report.
Billionaire donors like Charles Koch and Jeffrey Yass have contributed to anti-Trump super PACs, while other major donors like Joe Craft and Stan Druckenmiller are backing candidates still polling in single digits, but no rival has emerged from the GOP pack to give the former president a challenge, reported Bloomberg.
“They’re still trying to figure this race out,” said one of those GOP challengers, Chris Christie. “Everybody’s kind of holding back a little bit and seeing how the rest of us perform and seeing if somebody emerges from our group.”
GOP insiders fear Trump's legal problems will make him unelectable if he wins the 2024 nomination, which appears almost certain at this point, and Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) called on Republican megadonors to help narrow the field and pick one challenger to back.
“A few billionaires have already committed tens of millions of dollars," Romney said in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed. "They have a responsibility to give their funds with clear eyes about their candidate’s prospects. Family, friends and campaign donors are the only people who can get a lost-cause candidate to exit the race.”
The Republican Party has tried to thin the herd by imposing stricter rules for qualifying to take part in debates, requiring at least 40,000 individual donors and 1-percent support in at least three polls for the first debate Aug. 23 in Milwaukee, and subsequent debates will have progressively higher thresholds.
So far only seven candidates have managed to crack that threshold -- Trump, Christie, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, former ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley and South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott.
"The lack of coordination among those bankrolling the Republican primary creates a dream scenario for the former president, splitting the money and support from influential voices among the roughly dozen candidates in the race and repeating what even anti-Trump donors say was a mistake in 2016," Bloomberg reported.
