During the final stretch financing can become especially crucial to a campaign. As the days dwindle away so do the opportunities to influence the outcome, and you don’t want to be the side that runs out of money.

This is exposing a long-time weakness of the Trump campaign. While their fundraising has had some very good results occasionally, it has been sporadic and disorganized. More importantly, Trumps early refusal to raise large quantities of cash for his Presidential effort meant that the campaign started the General Election with an almost entirely vestigial operation. Even now after months of beefing up there are estimates that the Democrats still have more than twice as many paid staff out in the states organizing managing and fundraising. Because of this, Trump is unusually reliant on state party organizations to build up the get out the vote operation. State party organizations that largely dislike him, and worry that his takeover of the Republican nomination will scupper their delicately laid local political plans.

Reports have come out, from early voting states like Nevada in particular, that local and state GOP organizations are having trouble with such basic things as getting more lawn signs and campaign stickers from the Trump campaign. And that is leaving entirely to one side the fact that Trump is ideally meant to be helping them with fundraising and organization, not the other way

The Clinton campaign, by contrast,  raked in more than $100 million last month through their various funding vehicles. About thirty of that was through joint fundraising committees with  Democrats from Congress or State parties, so much of it will go to supporting people who aren’t named Clinton.

Counting all their various joint committees Trump  will have about $68 million going in to the dying days of the contest against Clinton’s $153 million. The Clinton campaign on its own directly controls nearly as much in its own right, excluding all PAC’s and joint committees as the Trump side has in total.

That is very, very bad for the Red team, as it seems that the Clinton camp are going to use a good chunk of that money plastering the airwaves with advertising. What is worse, because Clinton  raised money early she was able to secure advertising space more cheaply. So in order to respond, Trump must now pay the higher cost demanded by stations and media companies for last moment purchases.

Add to that the extra money Clinton can afford to transfer to other Democrats in need of cash, how much more she can spend on busing volunteers, conducting research, manning phone banks and you see how much of a headwind this sort of funding disadvantage can provide.

This sort of thing is not usually decisive, but it can help turn a victory into a blowout. But it demonstrates most clearly of all that the Trump campaign is not organizationally and logistically capable of conducting the kind of electorate-changing work that would be needed for the Trump theory to function in practice.