We won’t have the official numbers from the campaigns for another 19 days but it’s not often that campaigns outright lie about their fundraising hauls since they’ll have to release official records in a couple weeks anyway. Then again, Trump lies all the time about stuff that he has to know he’ll get caught lying about, so who knows. Anyway, on to the campaigns’ own claims about what they did and did not raise:

Per release, Clinton raised $63M in July, plus another $26M for DNC and state parties. Trump said last night he raised about $35.8M.

— Alexandra Jaffe (@ajjaffe) August 2, 2016

What’s not entirely clear is whether the $35.8M that Trump claims to have raised was just for his campaign, or for his campaign combined with RNC Victory. Either way, it is a step in the right direction for the Trump fundraising operation, and by that I mean, it’s a step in the right direction that such an operation exists at all.

Still, it’s pretty clear that Hillary is going to have much, much, much more money in the bank as this campaign heads down the home stretch. Some part of this money advantage is going to not be as important as was previously thought – Clinton has already been spending a ton more money on television than Trump, and there’s not a tremendous amount of evidence that it has really helped because Trump gets so much earned media anyway.

On the other hand, it seems pretty clear that Trump’s best case scenario right now is a very close race. In such a race, data operations/GOTV can make a huge difference. And Hillary is both going to have a significant advantage in terms of staff, but also inherits Obama’s substantial and impressive data team with all its institutional knowledge. How much will that be worth? Maybe 1-2%, but that’s a margin of error that Trump currently doesn’t have.