The long-anticipated presidential campaign of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has struggled to gain ground on the Republican primary’s frontrunner, former President Donald Trump, but as he heads into the summer and fall he will have a substantial war chest to help fund his effort.

In just six weeks since he announced his candidacy, DeSantis has brought in $20 million, his campaign said in a release on Thursday.

Official campaign finance filings with the Federal Election Commission will be made public later this month and the DeSantis team shared few details beyond the overall number.

“Joe Biden’s leftist policies are destroying the country, and Republicans are excited to invest in a winner ready to lead America’s revival,” DeSantis’ campaign manager Generra Peck said in a statement.

DeSantis announced the fundraising haul with a heavily qualified boast that it was the “best first fundraising quarter of any non-incumbent candidate in more than a decade,” framing Trump as a “quasi-incumbent,” despite him no longer being president. 

However, Trump’s campaign said they raised $35 million between April 1 and June 30, according to multiple media reports. The contributions were split between his official campaign and his leadership political action committee, Save America, but breakdown of how the money was distributed was not immediately available.

A disclaimer attached to his fundraising appeals says 90% of every donation goes to the official campaign and 10% goes to Save America. 

The Trump campaign did not immediately confirm their reported $35 million haul or return a request for comment from Spectrum News.

The $20 million DeSantis says he raised outpaced the combined $18.3 million Trump’s campaign raised between his announcement on Nov. 15 of last year and March 31 this year. But through Save America, Trump also brought in close to $5 million in the last month of 2022, according to federal records. Based on reports, it appears the committee brought in several million more the first three months of 2023.

Like other political action committees, Save America is not required to report its 2023 activities with the FEC until July 31. Presidential campaigns are required to file every three months. The next deadline is July 15.

DeSantis currently sits in a distant second in national Republican primary polling, trailing Trump by nearly 30 percentage points on average, according to the polling aggregator FiveThirtyEight. Trump’s average lead was as narrow as 2% as recently as February, before DeSantis officially launched his campaign and before Trump was arrested and charged in two separate criminal cases that have seemed to only solidify his support among a slim-majority of primary voters.

Trump has made the indictments against him — one a state case in New York and the other a federal prosecution in Florida — central to his campaign, pointing to them as an example of the political persecution he tells his supporters he is facing.

“It’s called election interference and it’s backfired on them,” Trump said in a speech in South Carolina on Saturday. “My poll numbers are much higher now than they were three months ago. And we were still leading by a lot, but now we’re really leading.”

“A lot of people are going to start dropping out, watch,” he added.

Other candidates in the primary have yet to release their most recent fundraising totals for the second quarter of 2023, but none are cracking double digits in polls.

Beyond raising money to help raise their profiles, the low-polling candidates also need to attract 40,000 individual donors to qualify for the first Republican presidential debate in August. 

“We’re about 5,000, so we got, again, more work to do,” former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson said on a radio show on Thursday. “The [Republican National Committee] is basically saying you need to spend $1 to 2 million in order to generate 40,000 donors.”

DeSantis has made little of his main opponent’s two criminal indictments, the first ever handed down to an American president. In the immediate aftermath of both arraignments, DeSantis defended Trump and decried the “weaponization of federal law enforcement.”

Instead, the two-term Florida governor has contrasted their efficacy as executives, argued Republicans can’t afford a repeat of Trump’s 2020 performance, and attempted to position himself to the right on hot button issues including abortion, LGBTQ rights, and “wokeness” in higher education, the military and corporations. 

“I believe 2024 is make or break. I don’t think we have time for excuses, we’re not going to get a mulligan on this one, and I think I’ve shown the ability to defeat the Democrats,” DeSantis said in an interview with conservative commentator Tomi Lahren on Wednesday. “We beat them on [COVID-19] lockdowns, we beat them on education, we beat them on [corporate environmental, social and governance policies], we beat them on immigration, we beat them on transgender athletes competing with women.”

“I’ll run, I’ll beat Biden,” he added. “But I think even more importantly than that, I will deliver on all these things.”