Welcome back to The Stratosphere.

Tonight, my conversation with Puck’s co-founder and editor-in-chief Jon Kelly about all the most pressing questions coalescing around the end of the presidential fundraising quarter.

Mentioned in this email: Steve Cohen, Dan Loeb, David Sacks, Bubba Saulsbury, Linda McMahon, Timothy Mellon, KKR’s Henry Kravis and Ken Mehlman, Mike Pence fundraiser Bob Reynolds and the always-controversial Nancy Jacobson of No Labels.

In the run-up to the close of books, I connected with Puck’s co-founder and editor-in-chief Jon Kelly to talk about all that and more.

You’ve been covering ’24 in a sneaky way, via the backdoor of the donor complex. I’d love to hear you extemporize on a few candidates who you’re paying special attention to. Can you offer a surprising name or two on your radar when it comes to fundraising?

This is likely one of the exceptional cases where a candidate’s fundraising appeal is inversely proportional to their electability. I am aware of several major Democratic givers who view supporting Christie’s super PAC as a cost-effective bankshot anti-Trump strategy. The thinking from donors is that Christie could leverage a couple giant super PAC donations on advertising to essentially buy the 40,000 small-dollar campaign donations he needs and force his way onto the debate stage, armed with a rhetorical bazooka aimed at Trump (assuming he shows up).

There will also be some traditional G.O.P. finance heavies who will be excited for Christie. No, the Mooch isn’t a heavy, sorry, but Steve Cohen, Dan Loeb and other Wall Street centrist-y types will likely cut six- and seven-figure checks to the guy. Of course, they ain’t regular voters.

Here’s a second name to watch when the super PACs file reports at the end of July: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. The super PAC backing him has said that it has raised at least $6 million dollars in the three months he’s been in the race—a not insignificant sum. I’m curious if any of the Silicon Valley elites who have flocked to his campaign—among them David Sacks, Jack Dorsey, and Chamath Palihapitiya—are cutting significant checks.

What about DeSantis? It seems like DeSantis is losing steam once again, with voters and the media, in early primary states. How’re things going since the Miami Four Seasons bundler telethon event?

DeSantis is wrapping up a frenzied June fundraising calendar that brought him all over the country for two dozen hard-dollar events. Meanwhile, his super PAC will report having raised over $100 million already, largely because of the $83 million he transferred over from his state campaign war chest to his federal super PAC—a legally controversial gambit that he’s probably going to get away with.

If DeSantis is not the Republican nominee, it will not be because he didn’t have enough money. I’ve been talking with a bunch of top G.O.P. givers or aides recently, and it’s clear that many of them decided to settle and somewhat unhappily commit to the DeSantis path almost from the outset of this cycle, rather than settling later on during the primary season once the field winnows. I think DeSantis is further to the right than plenty of G.O.P. donors, but they know if they want to beat Trump, there is probably only one guy who can do that.

Trump hosted his first major fundraiser on the night of his arraignment. Now, according to the Times, he’s tithing up to ten percent of donor cash to his legal defense fund. Does Trump’s campaign infrastructure suggest he’ll be running a small dollar operation? Or is he still hunting for a few whales?

Trump is still going to have a traditional bundling operation—watch Texans like oil guy Bubba Saulsbury, and perhaps a recently liquid Linda McMahon—but I don’t know how successful it will be. Trump is going to be powered by small givers, one indictment at a time.

That said, this cycle will be more similar to 2016 than to 2020—major donors have choices this time around beyond being futilely anti-Trump. To wit, I reported the other day that Dick Uihlein, one of the G.O.P.’s biggest donors and a major Trump guy, was slated to host some events for DeSantis when he swings through the Midwest next month. That strikes me as something of a foreboding sign, given that Uihlein, a major supporter of the Club for Growth, is much further right than his peers in the billionaire class. The likeliest mega-donor to Trump during this cycle’s primary would probably be Timothy Mellon, the Wyoming scion of the Gilded Age dynasty who came out of nowhere during the Trump presidency with eight-figure gifts to back everything from congressional Republicans to a quixotic attempt to fund the border wall, himself.

We all know about the political-philanthropic ambitions of the Larry Ellisons of the world, but who are the Wall Street guys getting behind this cycle on the right?

I’ll go one step further and share a few previously unreported news nuggets, Jon. One name to watch is Henry Kravis, the private equity legend, and Ken Mehlman, the former R.N.C. chairman turned KKR executive, who I have learned recently co-hosted a no-money-required fundraiser (a “friendraiser” in the nomenclature of the biz) at KKR offices on June 9 for Tim Scott that got good turnout from across Wall Street. Kravis isn’t approaching Ellison levels of enthusiasm for Scott, but he threw in big for Jeb in 2016 and is representative of how lots of McConnell-loving, establishment-type givers are gah-gah for Scott.

Another Wall Street heavy, Bob Reynolds, the C.E.O. of Putnam Investments, is scheduled to throw an upcoming fundraiser for Mike Pence in Boston, I hear. It won’t be the first time that Reynolds has hosted Pence: He put on a Trump reelection event featuring Pence at his home in Nantucket in 2020. Since then, Reynolds appears to have soured on Trump. A classic establishment Republican (he has given $1 million to the McConnell super PAC over the last few years), Reynolds was aghast at what happened at the Capitol on January 6. I and other insiders have wondered whether Pence, despite being a former VP, could have a money problems during the primary. If so, having Reynolds in his corner helps.

I’m also very interested in the crypto folks this cycle. Nick Tomaino, the founder of the web3 investment firm 1confirmation, hosted DeSantis for breakfast in Carson City, Nevada on June 17 with a small group of crypto entrepreneurs, I’m told. “He’s not deep on crypto yet. His main focus is the primaries and it’s not a big issue in early states,” Tomaino tweeted last week. “But he’s squarely on the side of freedom and has the best shot to win of any pro-crypto Presidential candidate we have for 2024.”

Here are the nightmares for each of the parties’ biggest donors. On the right, there is an abiding fear of replaying 2016, when all the billionaires and their aides-de-camp tried to dethrone Trump unsuccessfully. The watchword is consolidation. When will the field consolidate against Trump? Will it ever? Anti-Trump G.O.P. donor-advisors and fundraisers are split over just how analogous 2024 is to 2016—no one is underestimating Trump this time around, there aren’t as many well-financed candidates, etcetera—but smart people can and do disagree over how soon the winnowing needs to happen.

On the left, the nightmare is No Labels. Democratic moneymen and Biden allies see finding a way to disembowel No Labels as a 2023 priority. It comes up in almost every conversation I have on the topic: What happens if Joe Manchin runs on a third-party ticket and siphons the Biden margin, therefore electing Trump?

Democrats are also wrestling with what precisely they can do to convince No Labels C.E.O. Nancy Jacobson to stand down. It is, of course, largely outside their control. One idea gaining currency is to coax No Labels donors into getting Jacobson to wave the white flag, but there’s some mystery here: No Labels is technically not a political party but a dark-money, 501(c)4 group, and so no one knows definitively who their donors even are.

Lastly, let’s pivot to a quasi-political topic. Whenever we chat, I can’t help but ask you about Sam Bankman-Fried. What are the latest developments with his straw donor case? Also, has his indictment chilled the crypto donor class, Tomaino notwithstanding?

The campaign-finance charge against S.B.F. will be aired in court in October, so we’ll have to sit tight until then. On Tuesday, the judge overseeing the case declined, predictably, to throw the charges out. Meanwhile, it is now almost July, and we have yet to see any charges filed against S.B.F.’s fellow politicos Gabe Bankman-Fried or Ryan Salame, leading some people closely observing the Southern District to think that there’s no more indictments to come.

But to be blunt, there’s just not that much crypto wealth to spend in politics, period, anymore. If FTX and crypto had not gone belly-up, this would’ve been the presidential cycle for characters like S.B.F. Instead, he’s just watching the campaign like the rest of us. Well, not like the rest of us—his Internet use and news consumption under house arrest is heavily curtailed and monitored, by court order. But his fellow former crypto moguls—many of whose businesses FTX acquired or bailed out before going bankrupt, itself—aren’t exactly awash in cash, either.