WASHINGTON (AP) - Hillary Clinton spent $645,000 more a day than her opponent Donald Trump last month, but even with her $50 million campaign outlay, she has not been able to pull away from him in the race for the White House.
Clinton's campaign had its most expensive month to date in August, eclipsing its previous monthly high by more than $12 million. And combined, Clinton and the national Democratic Party paid out $78 million in August, while Trump and the Republican National Committee spent approximately $47 million.
While both candidates are raising huge sums from donors, their lopsided spending lays bare the difference in the two major party presidential campaigns. Clinton is running a conventional operation featuring multimillion-dollar ad buys and expansive voter outreach. Trump has kept spending down by enjoying seemingly limitless free media coverage and outsourcing the guts of his voter contact duties to the Republican Party.
The spending disparity has also become a favored Trump boast.
"Our expenditures on advertising, our expenditures on people, our expenditures on everything are a tiny fraction. And yet we're minimum tied," Trump said Tuesday at a rally in Kenansville, North Carolina. "If you can spend less and be winning, that's a positive thing, right?"
Josh Schwerin, a spokesman for the Clinton campaign, said Trump has been "derelict" in building a political operation that would help not only himself but down-ballot Republicans.
Four years ago, President Barack Obama and GOP nominee Mitt Romney each raised and spent approximately $1 billion, a formidable number that Clinton's national finance director has also set as a benchmark.
Much of Clinton's spending has been eaten up by advertising, which is costing her about $10 million per week. Through August, she blanketed 11 states with 35,714 broadcast television commercials to Trump's 7,457 in five states, according to Kantar Media's political ad data.
Clinton also has built a robust campaign team of 800 employees who cost a total of approximately $5 million last month. Even after an August hiring spree, Trump has a far smaller shop of about 130 employees and more than 100 consultants.
Among those consultants: Former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski. He parted ways with Trump in mid-June - and was immediately hired as a CNN contributor - but his Green Monster firm received a $20,000 payment for "strategy consulting" Aug. 11, the same amount it has regularly been paid for months.
The campaign said it will continue paying Lewandowski's firm severance through the end of the year to "honor its contract" with him.
The Trump campaign's biggest expense for the month was more than $11 million to Giles-Parscale for digital consulting and online advertising. Like Trump, the Texas firm is new to politics.
The Clinton campaign's August fundraising report shows increases in legal and polling expenses, which appear to reflect those firms' billing cycles. The campaign spent about $450,000 on legal bills and almost $1.3 million on polling.