Republican 2024 Hopeful Offers $20 Gift Cards for $1 Donations

Another long-shot Republican presidential candidate is using $20 gift cards to buy his way onto the GOP's debate stage next month.

On Tuesday, Miami Mayor Francis Suarez, a late entrant into the Republican primaries, said his campaign would be giving donors a $20 gift card for donating as little as $1 to his campaign.

A previous fundraising effort also being promoted by Suarez's campaign, announced earlier in July, advertises the chance to win a year's tuition to any college in the U.S., although the fine print stipulates a limit of $15,000.

"Bidenomics is making the American Dream unaffordable, so I asked, 'how can I help,' and you answered," Suarez wrote in a tweet announcing the effort.

Suarez's appeals for cash—and his willingness to give away a lot of money to get it— mirrors a program by fellow millionaire Doug Burgum's campaign to attract the 65,000 unique donors his campaign needs to meet the Republican National Committee's qualifications to participate in August's debate in Milwaukee.

That effort was ultimately successful, with the Burgum campaign telling CNN last week he had amassed enough donors to qualify.

While some questioned the ethics of Burgum's approach, the deep-pocketed software developer brushed off those concerns in an interview with USA Today earlier this week. He told the newspaper the move was tantamount to a business decision intended to introduce voters to the Burgum brand.

"We just said, 'Oh, that's the rule? Well, let's figure out a way,'" Burgum said. "We'll do a hack, we'll get around it. And we'll do it in a way that's completely legal and completely smart."

Nor is Suarez, by all accounts, anywhere near stuck for cash. A lawyer and private equity executive who gets a six-figure salary as Miami's mayor, he reportedly doubled his wealth during his time in office.

Meanwhile, he is being investigated in Miami-Dade County over alleged payments he received from a real estate developer for help with permitting for a $70 million project in Miami's Coconut Grove neighborhood. In June, the mayor told Miami's NBC TV station that the investigation "doesn't concern me. It really is in some ways a preview of what's to come in terms of the scrutiny you are under. You have to accept that scrutiny."

Newsweek has reached out to Suarez's campaign via email for comment.

Suarez, however, will likely need more than a few donors to get on next month's debate stage.

As of Sunday, just seven of the race's 13 GOP candidates—Donald Trump, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, former Vice President Mike Pence, former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, South Carolina Senator Tim Scott and former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie—had reached the 1 percent or higher threshold in a pair of qualifying state and national-level polls, which they need to qualify. Burgum crossed that threshold earlier this week.

Suarez, who entered the race in June, has so far failed to register with most voters, regularly polling as low as 0 percent in some major polls. Some national polls show him below even relatively unknown candidates like Will Hurd.