NYT on the worst of both worlds for Trump campaign:

The arrangement is a kind of throwback to the pre-Citizens United era, when party organizations — not independent “super PACs” and political nonprofits — assumed many of the financial and organizational burdens of national campaigns.

But it also highlights the bind in which Republican leaders find themselves as Mr. Trump’s struggles threaten to undermine the party’s Senate and House candidates in November: As dependent as Mr. Trump is on their organization, the party is now deeply dependent on Mr. Trump’s surging base of small donors to finance it.
“There is no moving the turnout operation or the absentee ballot program away from Donald Trump and in some senator’s favor,” Reince Priebus, the Republican National Committee chairman, said in an interview on Sunday with CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “It doesn’t work that way. There’s no hundred million dollars in a drawer that might not be spent on one person, but in favor of another.”

In contrast with campaign financing in 2012, there is no outside cavalry of deep-pocketed super PACs preparing to buttress Mr. Trump’s television and field efforts. Two of the largest outside groups backing Mr. Trump began August with less than $4 million combined cash on hand, according to Federal Election Commission filings, half of it from a single donor, the wealthy New York investor Robert Mercer. The primary super PAC backing Mrs. Clinton, Priorities USA Action, reported $38.6 million in the bank and claimed an additional $44 million in committed funds from wealthy donors….

The parties cannot raise unlimited “soft money” contributions — money raised into state rather than federal accounts and parlayed into large-scale political advertising campaigns — as they could during the 1990s, before super PACs became legal.

“In 1996, national party committees could raise both federal money and nonfederal money,” said Benjamin L. Ginsberg, a former chief counsel at the Republican National Committee and a longtime Republican election lawyer. He added, “The 1996 R.N.C. raised significant money on its own it could spend as it saw fit.”