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Donald Trump, With Bare-Bones Campaign, Relies on G.O.P. for Vital Tasks

Donald J. Trump at a rally Saturday in Fredericksburg, Va. Much of his support comes from small donors.Credit...Al Drago/The New York Times

Donald J. Trump is leaning heavily on Republican Party organizations to provide crucial campaign functions like getting out the vote, digital outreach and fund-raising, at a time when some leading Republicans have called for party officials to cut off Mr. Trump and focus instead on maintaining control of Congress.

Despite an influx of campaign cash from small donors in July, Mr. Trump’s operation still largely resembles the bare-bones outfit that he rode to victory during the primary season, more concert tour than presidential campaign, according to interviews and documents filed with the Federal Election Commission through Saturday night. And some Republicans believe he is effectively out of time to invest in the kind of large-scale infrastructure that the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, will bring to the polls in November.

Mr. Trump spends little on polling and made his first advertising purchase of the general election campaign only last week. His rapidly growing digital fund-raising and voter-targeting operation is a partnership with the Republican National Committee, relying significantly on lists built and maintained in recent years by the party.

In July, when Mrs. Clinton spent almost $3 million to field a staff of 700 people at her Brooklyn headquarters and in swing states around the country, according to Federal Election Commission payroll data, Mr. Trump spent more money on renting arenas for his speeches than he did on payroll. A senior Trump campaign official, who asked for anonymity because he was not permitted to discuss staffing publicly, said Mr. Trump’s campaign had fewer than 200 total staff members at the end of July, about evenly divided between field offices and New York.

Although he has opened offices in Ohio and Florida in recent weeks, Mr. Trump’s field efforts rely primarily on roughly 500 Republican National Committee organizers scattered across 11 swing states.

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 Republican-aligned groups with the deepest pockets, the American Crossroads operation co-founded by the Republican strategist Karl Rove and the constellation of political groups overseen by the billionaire industrialists Charles G. and David H. Koch, have abandoned the presidential race, choosing to focus their efforts down the ballot. Republican strategists overseeing the party’s most competitive Senate races have begun crafting their own independent turnout plans, mindful that their candidates need to reach middle-of-the-road voters Mr. Trump has forsaken.

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.”

Some Republicans believe that with the fall campaign weeks away, the party should focus its money and efforts down ballot to protect Republicans’ congressional base. That would mean quietly ignoring Mr. Trump’s call this month for a 50-state field operation and instead emphasizing congressional districts and swing states that are also Senate and House battlegrounds.

“They can’t do anything publicly — you can’t rebuke your nominee,” said Liam P. Donovan, a former aide to the National Republican Senatorial Committee. “But you could allocate resources to places where it helps up and down the ballot.”

The difficulty, though, is that as November approaches, the Republican National Committee is more reliant on Mr. Trump for cash than on other recent nominees. Millions of dollars are coming in through a small-donor-focused committee operated jointly with the committee, which is splitting a share of the proceeds with Mr. Trump. Over half the money raised by the Trump campaign and the committee combined in July came from donors giving less than $200, far more than for any recent Republican nominee. (That figure does not include additional small donations raised by a joint fund-raising committee that Mr. Trump’s campaign treasurer controls, which is not required to file disclosures until October.)

The campaign’s large-dollar fund-raising, also run jointly with the Republican National Committee, yielded $16 million in cash in July, but much of it is reserved under law for party accounts dedicated to the Republican National Convention, legal expenses and expenditures on offices. Despite being able to collect far more from each of the biggest Republican donors under new campaign finance rules passed in 2014, the committee is well off pace from its July fund-raising in 2012, when Mitt Romney was the party’s nominee.

While Mr. Trump has expanded his field operation in August — he announced the opening of 15 regional offices in Ohio, among other moves — his ability to find and turn out low-propensity Republican voters, a crucial group given his campaign strategy, will most likely turn on the Republican National Committee’s operation, set up three years ago to provide a basic grass-roots foundation for the party’s eventual nominee.

Mr. Trump also relied on the committee to front $3 million in cash to ramp up his direct mail, money the party recouped in July, according to Federal Election Commission reports.

The party is in turn providing much of the fund-raising expertise and technological backbone, including up-to-date donor lists and systems that will send roughly a billion emails by Election Day.

A third of the party’s digital team is now embedded at the San Antonio firm that formerly built websites for Mr. Trump’s properties and is now leading his campaign’s online efforts. Payments to that firm, Giles-Parscale, amounted to $8 million in July, most of which was paid out for online advertising to reach grass-roots supporters and donors, according to party officials.

“The R.N.C. has built the most efficient and effective ground game in the party’s history,” said Lindsay Walters, a party spokeswoman. “No other campaign, committee or organization has been doing this for as long as we have. We are the infrastructure for the entire G.O.P. ticket. And the Trump campaign has embraced that.”

Maggie Haberman contributed reporting.

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A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Trump Campaign Relying on G.O.P. for Vital Tasks. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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