Haley Entered 2024 With $14.6 Million, Fueling Her Enduring Bid

Nikki Haley, the last candidate standing between former President Donald J. Trump and the Republican nomination, raised $24 million in the last three months of 2023 and entered this year with $14.6 million in her campaign account, a hefty sum that has all but ensured she will have the money to press on with her insurgent bid for the White House.

The final fund-raising numbers of last year do not reveal how much Ms, Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, has raised since she came in a distant third place in the Iowa caucuses on Jan. 15, then lost again in the New Hampshire primary election eight days later.

But the filings with the Federal Election Commission on Wednesday do indicate that her frugal presidential campaign has kept a lid on spending as it has pressed for new contributions.

“We are running a smart campaign and that means spending our money wisely,” said Olivia Perez-Cubas, a spokeswoman for the Haley campaign. “Seventy percent of Americans don’t want a Biden-Trump rematch, and we have the resources and energy to make sure that doesn’t happen.”

While Ms. Haley’s campaign handled money carefully, a super PAC backing her, SFA Fund Inc., spent heavily on advertising in 2023. The group reported raising $50.2 million in the second half of 2023, for a total of $68.9 million all year, but spent nearly all of it, ending the year with about $3.5 million on hand.

This week, Ms. Haley, who was Mr. Trump’s first ambassador to the United Nations, made her pitch to some of the wealthiest donors in the country, seeking their support as she continues a long-shot bid for the Republican nomination. And when the week is done, her aides say, she will sit down, as she has throughout her run, and personally review her campaign’s expenses.

Until this month, her aides said, she flew almost entirely commercial, in contrast to other candidates, including Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, whose campaign spent at least $2.5 million on private jets, records on Wednesday showed.

This financial moderation was laid out in new federal filings, coupled with a steadily increasing base of donor support. Her campaign itself took in $17.3 million, including transfers from other committees she controls, and spent $14.3 million in the last three months of 2023.

The figures don’t include the past month, in which Mr. Trump handily won both Iowa and New Hampshire. But they help explain why she is the last remaining challenger.

In the first quarter of 2023, her campaign spent just 20 cents of every dollar it took in. In the second quarter, it spent 68 cents for every dollar. In the third quarter, that figure was 43 cents. Over the entire year, her campaign spent less than 60 cents for every dollar it took in — on the lower end among presidential candidates, and well below the burn rates of Mr. DeSantis and Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina.

Ms. Haley captured the attention of some big donors early in the cycle. Timothy C. Draper, a venture capital investor in California, gave her super PAC $2.25 million, while Jan Koum, a Ukrainian American businessman, gave the PAC a total of $10 million, starting in February.

She also scored some big names near the end of the year, as she gathered momentum in polls. The billionaire hedge fund managers Paul Singer and Kenneth C. Griffin gave her super PAC $5 million each in December.