With 15 days until Election Day in November, polls point to a margin-of-error race for the White House between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Trump.

But in the dash for campaign cash – another key metric in presidential politics – there is one very clear frontrunner: Harris.

The vice president entered the final full month of the campaign with a massive financial advantage over the former president, according to new federal fundraising filings late Sunday.

The Harris campaign hauled in $221.8 million in September, according to the filings, more than triple the $63 million brought in by the Trump campaign last month.

Roughly a quarter of the money raked in by the vice president came during celebrity-studded fundraisers in Los Angeles and San Francisco at the end of last month.

Harris has vastly outraised and outspent Trump since replacing President Biden atop the Democrats’ 2024 ticket three months ago, and that trend continued in September. The largest expense by the Harris campaign was for paid media – mostly to run ads.

But the vice president still enjoyed a large cash-on-hand advantage over Trump entering October.  

The Harris campaign reported $187 million in its coffers at the end of September, compared to $119 million for the Trump campaign.

The fundraising totals reported by the two major party campaigns don’t include additional money raked in by the two national party committees, other affiliated organizations – both campaigns use a slew of affiliated fundraising committees to haul in cash – or aligned super-PACs supporting Harris and Trump.

The Biden campaign and the Democratic National Committee enjoyed a fundraising lead over Trump and the Republican National Committee earlier this year. But Trump and the RNC topped Biden and the DNC by $331 million to $264 million during the second quarter of 2024 fundraising.

Biden enjoyed a brief fundraising surge after his disastrous performance in his late June debate with Trump as donors briefly shelled out big bucks in a sign of support for the 81-year-old president.

But Biden’s halting and shaky debate delivery also instantly fueled questions about his physical and mental ability to serve another four years in the White House and spurred a rising chorus of calls from within his own party for the president to end his bid for a second term. The brief surge in fundraising didn’t last and, by early July, began to significantly slow down. 

Biden bowed out of the 2024 race on July 21, and the party quickly consolidated around Harris, who instantly saw her fundraising soar, spurred by small-dollar donations.

The Harris campaign on Sunday spotlighted its grassroots donors, as it announced that 95% of its donations in the past three months were under $200.

This isn’t the first time Trump’s faced a fundraising deficit. He raised less than 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton in his White House victory and Biden four years ago in his re-election defeat.

When asked about the fundraising deficit, Republican National Committee chair Michael Whatley told Fox News Digital last month that ‘the Democrats have a ton of money. The Democrats always have a ton of money.’

However, he emphasized that ‘we absolutely have the resources that we need to get our message out to all the voters that we’re talking to and feel very comfortable that we’re going to be able to see this campaign through and we’re going to win on Nov. 5.’

The presidential campaigns later this week will give us another look at their finances – as they’re required on Thursday to file reports to the Federal Election Commission for their fundraising for the first 16 days of October.

Fundraising, along with polling, is a key metric in campaign politics and a measure of a candidate’s popularity and their campaign’s strength. The money raised can be used to – among other things – hire staff, expand grassroots outreach and get-out-the-vote efforts, pay to produce and run ads on TV, radio, digital and mailers, and for candidate travel.

Former President Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris are neck and neck in recent polling as they enter the final leg of the presidential race, as the Democratic nominee appears to be losing ground among Latino and Black voters. 

A new USA TODAY/Suffolk University Poll places Harris at 45% and Trump at 44%. 

In August, the same poll found that Harris was ahead of Trump 48% to 43% on the heels of the Democratic National Convention. The new survey released Monday questioned 1,000 likely voters by landline and cell phone from Oct. 14-18. The margin of error was plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.

Harris has fallen back in support among Latino and Black voters in the seven weeks between surveys. The new poll found Latino voters now back Trump by 49% to 38%. Black voters prefer Harris by 72% to 17%, but that 55-point edge is significantly less than the advantage Democrats traditionally enjoy. 

For the subsamples of Latino and Black voters, the survey’s margins of error are plus or minus 9 points, signaling possible repositioning of up to 18 points in one direction or the other. 

President Biden benefited from staggering support from Black and Latino voters four years ago. A Pew Research Center analysis found 92% of Black voters and 59% of Latino voters supported Biden in the 2020 race. 

Trump has made inroads among Black and Latino voters in the 2024 race by courting men, as he campaigns on the economy and crime. 

Observing the shift in Democrats’ traditional edge, the Harris campaign unveiled an economic agenda for Black men last week. It promised small business loans and the legalization of recreational marijuana. 

Her campaign also ramped up events targeting Latino and Black voters in battleground states, and former President Barack Obama chastised Black men, claiming they could be hesitant to vote for a woman as president. 

In a separate poll conducted across seven battleground states, 47% of respondents said they would definitely or probably back Harris, while 47% said they would definitely or probably support Trump. According to the Washington Post-Schar School survey, 49% of likely voters support Harris, while 48% support Trump. 

Among swing states, Trump is performing well in Arizona, while Harris fares best in Georgia.

The poll also surveyed a portion of the electorate in the swing states dubbed ‘deciders’ – people who have not fully committed to a candidate. About 74% of voters in the swing states said they would definitely vote for Harris or Trump – an increase from the 58% who said they had already decided in the spring. 

Over a five-month period, uncommitted voters narrowed from 42% to 26%. The latest survey showed 21% of likely voters across the seven states were not fully committed to either Harris or Trump. 

According to an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research (AP-NORC) poll released on Monday, most registered voters are divided on whether Trump or Harris are better equipped to handle specific economic issues, including unemployment, the cost of groceries and housing, or tariffs.

The survey found only 38% of registered voters say the national economy is doing well, while 62% of respondents expressed believing the economy is in poor condition.

New reporting about over a dozen unidentified drones that were allowed to fly over Langley Air Force Base has prompted fresh calls for change to a threat that experts say will only become more prevalent. 

For more than two weeks in December 2023, the mystery drones traipsed into restricted airspace over the installation, home to key national security facilities and the F-22 Raptor stealth fighters. 

Experts say the incident is likely one of many that U.S. authorities are underprepared to tackle in an evolving threat environment. 

Lack of a standard protocol for such incursions left Langley officials unsure of what to do – other than allow the 20-foot-long drones to hover near their classified facilities. 

The Pentagon has said little about the incidents other than to confirm they occurred after a Wall Street Journal report this month. Whether it knows where the drones came from or what they were doing is unclear.

‘I think they don’t know,’ one congressional source familiar with defense operations told Fox News Digital. 

As defense-minded lawmakers sought more answers, Langley officials referred them to the FBI, who referred them to Northern Command, who referred them to local law enforcement, the source said. 

‘They should easily be able to know exactly what they are,’ said Brett Velicovich, an advisor to drone tech company Red Cat Holdings and a Fox News contributor.

‘There are all kinds of radar systems out there. Each drone has its own fingerprint.’

‘Saying we don’t know what it is, and if we’re taking them for their word that they don’t know what it is, that speaks to a larger issue that the administration really just got caught with its pants down, and they’ve failed.’ 

If the drones were a foreign adversary testing the limits of U.S. defenses, the message they took home is that encroaching on restricted airspace is easy enough, according to Velicovich. 

U.S. capabilities offer many different ways to take down a drone, including shooting them, zapping them with heat lasers and jamming the frequencies.

Whether Congress needs to change the laws is a point of contention, but one thing that is clear is incursions like the one at Langley prompt confusion over legal authority. 

When drones encroach near bases overseas, the rules of engagement give service members more leeway to engage with them. 

However, U.S. law does not allow the military to shoot down drones near its bases unless they pose an imminent threat. While Langley has the authority to protect its coastal base, the Coast Guard has the authority to protect the waters, the Federal Aviation Administration has authority over U.S. airspace – some of the most congested with commercial airliners in the world. 

‘After 9/11, we invested all this money in homeland security to deal with exactly the kind of things that we’re seeing today,’ said James Carafano, defense expert at the Heritage Foundation. ‘We built this whole infrastructure to deal with that. And it just seems, where is it today? We’ve been very lackadaisical about this.’ 

‘We’re going to have a terrorist attack here at some point. It’s just going to happen.’

Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Ala., chair of the House Armed Services Committee, argued that the Defense Department needs to use the authority it has been given. 

‘Drone incursions at DOD facilities are alarming. The Department needs to focus on deploying real, effective capabilities across critical installations using existing authorities given to them by Congress. I will continue to conduct oversight of the department’s response to these drone incursions,’ he said in a statement. 

Sen. Jerry Moran, R-Kansas, promised to introduce legislation to give the Pentagon greater authority to shoot down drones. 

‘Military leaders currently lack the authority to engage until there is an imminent threat posed to our men and women in uniform. I am working on legislation to provide the Department of Defense with the necessary authorities to engage drones or unidentified aircrafts that breach our military airspace before it is too late to respond.’ 

Mississippi Sen. Roger Wicker, the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, called for Congress to pass laws laying out counter-drone procedures.

‘Adversaries like China, Russia and Iran are improving their drone capabilities every month. Our defenses are not catching up,’ he said. 

‘Congress needs to develop and execute a comprehensive set of plans to strengthen our counter-drone protocol and technological development right away. There is no time to waste. The lives of service members and all Americans are at risk.’

This month, Chinese national Fengyun Shi was sentenced to six months in prison for capturing drone footage over Huntington Ingalls Industries Shipbuilding in Newport News, Virginia, 10 miles from Langley Air Force Base.

Two months prior to Langley, in October 2023, five drones flew over the Energy Department’s Nevada National Security Site, used for nuclear weapons experiments. U.S. authorities were not sure who was behind those drones either. 

A Chinese surveillance balloon traversed over the U.S. for a week last year before the Air Force shot it down off the coast. 

U.S. Air Force’s Plant 42 in California, home to highly classified aerospace development, has also seen a slew of unidentified drone incursions in 2024, prompting flight restrictions around the facility. 

‘There are a lot of regulations on terms of what the DoD is allowed to do in the U.S. homeland that make this a really difficult problem,’ said Stacie Pettyjohn, director of the defense program at the Center for a New American Security. 

Even jamming the GPS systems, so drones freeze up and fall out of the sky, risks collateral damage. It could interfere with nearby air traffic.

‘Unlike when you’re in Iraq or somewhere and there are drones flying overhead, you can fire off a missile and intercept them without as much worry, because you’re in the middle of the desert,’ he continuted. ‘We’re going to see more of this in the future, and I think it’s something that the U.S. is grossly underprepared for.’

Even abroad, experts warn U.S. forces are unequipped to handle the threat of advancing drone warfare. 

Three U.S. service members were killed in a drone strike in January in Jordan. 

‘The response time for [counter-drone measures] is really small, and the U.S. doesn’t have a lot of systems that are optimized for this, and they’re quite expensive,’ said Pettyjohn. ‘We’re going to see more of these, probably larger groups operating together. Right now, they’re all remotely piloted. Eventually, they’ll be autonomous and really truly swarm.’

White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters on Monday that the United States is monitoring reports that North Korean soldiers are ‘deploying to Russia’ to fight in Ukraine. 

‘We’re obviously continuing to look into those reports,’ Kirby said. ‘We’re talking to our allies and partners about what they’re saying on this as well. If it’s true that the DPRK soldiers are going there to join the war against Ukraine, it would certainly mark a dangerous and highly concerning development.’ 

Kirby said the development signaled ‘another demonstration of Putin’s growing desperation and his growing isolation that he’s got to reach out to North Korea for potential – potential, as I said, we’re looking into the reports – potential infantry support, to his ground operations.’ 

‘There’s no question about it, that his forces continue to suffer an extraordinary amount of casualties on the battlefield,’ Kirby said, referencing figures of Russia losing more than 1,200 soldiers per day.

‘That is a truly historic amount of soldiers killed and wounded in this fight, all to accomplish but a warped and twisted idea of his about Ukraine’s ability to exist as a sovereign state,’ Kirby said. ‘I think all of this is and proves the point that Mr. Putin is increasingly desperate and increasingly isolated on the world stage.’ 

The U.S. and NATO have not confirmed that North Korean troops were sent to Russia. But the reports of their presence have already stoked concerns in South Korea that Russia might provide North Korea with sophisticated technologies that can sharply enhance the North’s nuclear and missile programs in return for its troop dispatch.

South Korea on Monday summoned the Russian ambassador to protest deepening military cooperation between Pyongyang and Moscow and demand the immediate pullout of the North Korean troops. 

South Korea’s spy agency said Friday it had confirmed that North Korea sent 1,500 special operation forces to Russia this month to support Moscow’s war against Ukraine. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy earlier said his government had intelligence that 10,000 North Korean soldiers were being prepared to join invading Russian forces.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, meanwhile, will be shaking hands this week with multiple world leaders, including China’s Xi Jinping, India’s Narendra Modi, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Iran’s Masoud Pezeshkian. They will convene in the Russian city of Kazan on Tuesday for a meeting of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, defying predictions that the war in Ukraine and an international arrest warrant against Putin would turn him into a pariah.

The alliance, which aims to counterbalance the Western-led world order, initially included Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa but started to rapidly expand this year. Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia joined in January; Turkey, Azerbaijan and Malaysia formally applied, and a number of others expressed a desire to be members.

‘These countries can decide for themselves who they want to associate with and, especially how they want to be economically linked with one another. Russia is increasingly isolated on the world stage,’ Kirby said Monday. ‘There’s no question about that. Mr. Putin is still having to take radical steps to prop up his, currency, and to keep his war economy going.’ 

Putin is expected to end the BRICS conference with a press conference on Thursday, Reuters reported.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.