Inside Ron DeSantis' Donations That Crushed Donald Trump's

Ron DeSantis might still be lagging behind Donald Trump in the polls. His fundraising, however, is another story.

According to numbers first shared with Fox News Thursday, the DeSantis campaign reported raising a massive $150 million haul between his campaign and his affiliated Never Back Down political action committee, far exceeding the $35 million reported by the Trump campaign earlier in the week.

Though DeSantis still lags in most national polls, that sum, Never Back Down CEO Chris Jankowski said in a statement after the release, "shows what a formidable movement is behind Governor DeSantis," demonstrating that the "future of the Republican Party is Governor Ron DeSantis."

For comparison, Vivek Ramaswamy—another candidate in the race—seeded his campaign with $10 million of his own money, while figures like Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy reported raising just $6 million in second quarter fundraising numbers shared with the press after the Federal Elections Commission's June 30^th close of books deadline.

Meanwhile, Tim Scott, one of the strongest fundraisers in the U.S. Senate, reported a total of $21.9 million in its account as of March 31, raising just $2 million in his campaign's first 24 hours after launching in May.

However, DeSantis' fundraising volume, while impressive, comes with an asterisk.

Of the $150 million raised, $130 million reportedly came from Never Back Down—an organization that already reportedly had $500,000 in the bank prior to DeSantis' decision to enter the race. Of that $130 million, some $82.5 million of the organization's account balance came directly from a controversial funds transfer from an account DeSantis previously used to finance his gubernatorial bids in Florida.

That transfer has already drawn a challenge from the watchdog group Campaign Legal Center, which filed a complaint to the FEC in May arguing his gubernatorial campaign illegally financed a pro-DeSantis PAC that is not allowed to coordinate directly with the campaign.

Of the remaining $67.5 million raised by the PAC, some $20 million came from Las Vegas hotelier Robert Bigelow, who told Time Magazine in an interview earlier this year he would "give him more money and go without food" in his own bid to see DeSantis elected.

Still, $47.5 million raised by the PAC is nothing to sneeze at—and still far beyond what the Trump campaign reported in the last quarter.

However, some in the Trump camp expressed some reservations DeSantis' team would be able to keep up the pace over the course of a long campaign.

Of the $20 million directly raised by his campaign, approximately $8.1 million was raised within the first 24 hours of DeSantis' glitch-laden decision to enter the race on May 24, according to claims by his campaign at the time, with the remaining $11.9 million raised over the next month.

However, that initial $8.1 million haul amounted to an average donation of over $200 per donor, according to estimates by the New York Times at the time—a figure far beyond what is typically seen from the "small donors" emblematic of strong grassroots support.

It was a statistic that did not go unnoticed by Team Trump, which sought to throw a wet towel over DeSantis' initial haul shortly after the numbers were announced.

"The DeSantis campaign is dead with small-dollar GOP donors," Trump adviser Jason Miller tweeted Thursday. "Once they've cycled through the Wall Street globalists and Club for No Growth-types, there's nowhere else to go...and the lagging poll numbers aren't helping."

Trump's campaign is no enemy of the nation's elite either, however: in a recent CNBC millionaire's survey, the majority were firmly behind Trump for the Republican nomination.

Newsweek has reached out to Never Back Down and the Trump campaign for comment.