Martin O’Malley’s Democratic presidential campaign has staff working without pay and secured a $500,000 loan last December in an attempt to remain solvent, The Washington Post reported Monday.
{mosads}His campaign also redeployed staff from its national headquarters in Baltimore to Iowa and other early-voting states, the newspaper reported. Some of O’Malley’s junior and senior staff in Baltimore have since forgone pay while working for him, the Post added.
“[It] says a lot about the loyalty that he inspires in the campaign,” spokeswoman Haley Morris told the newspaper.
The Post reported Monday that it is not immediately clear how many staffers are working without pay.
O’Malley’s loan emerged in Federal Election Commission (FEC) filings that also detail his fundraising last quarter.
His campaign raised $1.5 million including the loan, far behind Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton’s $37 million and $33.6 million for Bernie Sanders.
O’Malley’s campaign is additionally enrolled in a public financing system that matches contributions of $250 or less with federal funds.
The program limits how much candidates can spend overall and on individual state primaries and caucuses, however.
Morris told the Post that O’Malley’s camp has hauled in $900,000 since Jan. 1, outside the latest FEC reporting period, and has paid off the $500,000 loan.
O’Malley has struggled for traction with voters since launching his Oval Office bid last summer. He trails Clinton by over 49 percent nationwide, according to the latest RealClearPolitics average of surveys.
The former Maryland governor is also struggling in Iowa before its first-in-the-nation caucuses Monday evening. He ranks last in voter support there among Democrats, with 4.3 percent, per the most recent index of Hawkeye State polls.