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Former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley's presidential campaign and affiliated accounts raised about $8.3 million in the first quarter of this year, new campaign filings show, a number short of the $11 million her campaign touted earlier this month.
Why the short change?
Haley’s campaign got to $11 million by counting the topline totals reported by each of her three committees — her campaign account, a leadership PAC and a joint fundraising committee.
The problem? About $2.7 million of the total is money that was raised by one of those accounts and transferred to another during the first quarter. That means the money was counted twice on the reports’ topline totals — since the $2.7 million technically shows up as money received by groups on different occasions.
So even though the campaign accurately disclosed it transferred that cash around, a cursory look at only the top-line numbers misses that important nuance.
Haley’s campaign is far from the first to use this tactic — it's a regular issue for candidates who fundraise across different committees, sometimes through what's called a joint fundraising committee, a group set up to collect big checks and divvy donations up among a slew of related groups.
But the episode is a reminder of why it’s important to remember that until the raw filings are made public, any sneak preview of a candidate’s fundraising is taken with a grain of salt.
Haley's campaign did not respond on the record to a request to comment about the discrepancy.
Haley's reports were just a piece of the big takeaways from the first fundraising quarter of the year.