Ron DeSantis’ political committee rakes in nearly $5.6 million in June

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Correction: An earlier version of this story was based on incomplete figures. All totals have been updated accordingly.

Whether an increased national profile leads Gov. Ron DeSantis to the White House someday remains speculation. But it is providing a wealth of resources for his reelection effort in 2022.

The Friends of Ron DeSantis political committee in June raised $5,553,665 in donations.

While DeSantis technically has not filed for reelection or launched his campaign, he’s expected to seek a second term. Not filing yet means he has not raised any money to an official account, but his June contribution haul exceeds what committees for Democratic opponents Charlie Crist and Nikki Fried reported for the past two months combined.

Perhaps more significant, the money came courtesy of more than 3,500 different donations to the committee and from all over the country. More than 2,600 of those donations were for less than $100, showing a bounty of interest from small donors.

That said, small checks are small checks. The majority of the money, $3,027,500 of it, came from 93 checks for five-figure sums or greater.

The biggest lift came courtesy a $1.8 million check from the Republican Governors Association.

Daytona Beach restaurateur Gale Lemerand gave the largest donation from an individual, a whopping $500,000 given on June 30.

One individual, Naples real estate agent Brenda O’Loughlin, made a donation of $100,000 to the committee. Another three checks of the same amount came from the political committees Associated Industries of Florida, Florida Prosperity Fund and Health Option One.

In total, 27 checks came from political committees, constituting $862,000 in total donations.

The heightened activity of the committee also means greater expenses, and the organization for June also reported $321,746 in spending. That included $85,450 that went to Washington-based Eleventh Street Strategies for fundraising efforts and another $33,628 for the same purpose to HMB Strategies in Tallahassee.

Another $27,296 went toward processing credit card payments alone.

While that’s a lot of overhead for fundraising, it seems to have paid off exponentially.

The bottom line, the committee closed the month of June with $44,521,330 in cash on hand. That’s an amount that eclipses the monetary efforts of Democrats.

Fried on Tuesday announced she had raised nearly $813,000 in the first month of her campaign for Governor. In all, the Democratic contender holds roughly $2.18 million on hand. Crist, meanwhile, raised $130,500 last month, a significant drop from the $1.2 million he raised in May, which was his first month in the race.