No, presidential candidates can’t do whatever they want with leftover campaign funds

Republican candidates raised millions of dollars in their quests to become their party’s nominee for the upcoming November general election.

There are just two candidates left in the race after Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who finished second in Iowa’s first-in-the-nation caucus, dropped out. A few other Republicans have also dropped out of the race this month, including Vivek Ramaswany and Chris Christie, after raising millions of dollars during their campaigns.

We previously VERIFIED how congressional candidates can use unspent campaign funds, but what about presidential candidates?

THE QUESTION

Can presidential candidates do whatever they want with leftover campaign funds?

THE SOURCES

• Federal Election Commission (FEC)

• Federal Register

• Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit investigative news organization

THE ANSWER

No, presidential candidates cannot do whatever they want with leftover campaign funds.

WHAT WE FOUND

Presidential candidates must follow many of the same rules as other candidates for federal office when it comes to their leftover funds, although there are a few rules unique to presidential candidates and primaries.

These rules, which are overseen by the Federal Election Commission (FEC), give candidates for president a lot of freedom over how they use their leftover campaign funds. The one thing all candidates for federal office – including former presidential candidates – cannot do with leftover campaign funds is use them for personal use. 

That means the leftover funds cannot simply be put into the candidate’s bank account or used to pay their mortgage. There are some exceptions, like legal expenses, that are considered gray areas by the FEC and evaluated on a case-by-case basis.

RELATED: No, politicians cannot do whatever they want with leftover campaign funds

According to the FEC, one way a former presidential candidate can spend their leftover funds is by “winding down” or terminating their campaign. This includes paying any outstanding bills or debts, or costs required to close up their offices.

Former candidates can also issue refunds to individual donors, donate the money to charity or pass as much of it as they want to national, state or local political party committees.

They can donate some of those funds to the committee of another federal candidate; however such donations are limited to $2,000 per election to any one candidate.

Similarly, a former candidate can donate leftover funds to political action committees (PACs), but only up to $5,000 a year to any one PAC.

Former candidates can also convert their official campaign committee into its own political action committee, which can give them more flexibility with how to use the money.

They can also transfer leftover campaign funds from their campaign for one federal office to another. For example, if a candidate is running for president and Congress in the same election cycle, they can transfer the leftover funds from their presidential campaign to their campaign fund for Congress once they’ve dropped out of the race for president.

The candidate can do something similar if they decide to run for Congress or president in the future. Ron DeSantis, for example, could transfer his remaining campaign funds to his next campaign for president if he decides to run again in a different election.

Finally, candidates for federal office, including presidential candidates, can let their leftover funds just sit around. The Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit investigative news organization, reported in 2014 that several former members of Congress still had millions of dollars in their campaign funds, even though some of those candidates hadn’t run for office in years. The reasoning for keeping all of this leftover money, the former congresspeople said, was in case they decided to run for federal office again in the future.

However, there are some rules regarding leftover funds for candidates who drop out of the presidential primaries that don’t apply to all federal offices.

First, this is a primary campaign, which the FEC considers to be different from a general election campaign. 

The FEC requires campaigns to adopt an accounting system that separates contributions made for the primaries and contributions made for the general election. That’s important because the FEC only allows candidates to raise funds for elections they’re actually running in.

So if someone running in the primary accepts donations for their expected general election campaign but ultimately fails to win their party’s nomination, the FEC says the candidate has to “refund, redesignate or reattribute” those donations within 60 days of dropping out. However, the candidate keeps their leftover funds from the primary campaign.

Additionally, presidential campaigns are unique in that certain amounts of donations to a candidate’s campaign are matched with federal government funding called public funds. This is true of both the general election and the primaries.

A candidate can use these public matching funds to pay off their campaign debts and wind down their campaigns even after they’ve dropped out of the election, the FEC says.

But these matching funds aren’t made available to campaigns until the beginning of the election year itself — Jan. 1, 2024 for this election — and only donations the campaigns receive after these funds become available are matched. So anyone who dropped out before January would not have been able to use public funds to wind down their campaign.