But the final straw for Walker's campaign was how his real god, the Almighty Dollar, had forsaken him:
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker was getting an in-depth debriefing about his campaign’s finances, and the situation was grim.
In a little more than two months, his presidential bid had amassed a debt of roughly $700,000, campaign manager Rick Wiley told the governor in a call Sunday night. A pared-down effort focused on staying afloat in Iowa would still cost around $1 million a month because of ongoing costs associated with ballot access, accounting and vendor contracts.
“It’s going to be tough to raise that million a month, I’ll be honest with you,” Wiley said he told Walker, according to an account he gave The Washington Post on Tuesday evening.
[...]
Donations began dwindling in mid-August after Walker’s tentative performance in the first Republican debate, according to several people familiar with the figures. The campaign tried to ramp up fundraising over Labor Day, with a series of events that officials hoped would bring in $500,000. In the end, they netted $184,000, Wiley said.
At that point, he said, both he and Grebe warned Walker that the campaign’s finances were slipping.
“We are taking huge hits,” Wiley said he told Walker. “We are going to have to shed staff. We are going to have to shed expenses.”
There was plenty of money socked away at Unintimidated PAC, the pro-Walker super PAC run by Walker allies, which was on its way to raising $40 million. But since the group could not directly coordinate its spending with Walker’s campaign, its resources were of little use.
Walker was so used to being able to launder the dark money that had poured in for him during his state campaigns that he didn't know how to operate under federal campaign finance laws that he could manipulate or ignore.
Now the tens of millions of dollars that walker had funneled into his PAC will be going to other candidates while Walker sulks by the sidelines.
It's all rather fitting.
Live by the dark money, die by the dark money.
