Democrats are growing increasingly alarmed by the spending chasm between the two sides — and its implications for the general election.

“The resources he has will be put to work anywhere and everywhere that he feels like he can scare up electoral votes, and Democrats will never catch up. It’s just too much money,” said Chris Lippincott, a Texas-based Democratic strategist who ran a super PAC opposing Sen. Ted Cruz last year. “That’s real trouble … I’m not here to curse the dark, but it’s dark.”

And the situation stands to get worse.

Since the start of the year, Trump’s campaign operation has run an expensive, far-reaching effort to find new small-dollar donors that is already beginning to pay dividends. The campaign netted 313,000 new donors between July and the end of September, according to numbers provided by the RNC, after spending $4.2 million in advertising on Facebook over the last 90 days.

Democrats, meanwhile, are still four or five months away — at the earliest — from settling on a nominee.

“We don’t know if the Democratic candidate is going to be able to even compete with such a shorter timeline, even if they have significant resources after the convention,” said Tara McGowan, founder and chief executive officer of the progressive group ACRONYM.

INTERACTIVE: Click to see a run-through of every 2020 Democratic candidate’s campaign fundraising for the third quarter.

With the Democratic primary in full swing, McGowan said, “There’s two separate elections going on, and the really unfortunate part is Trump is the only one involved in the general election today.”

The spending disparity could have wide-ranging consequences in the battle to defeat the president. Trump’s money is currently allowing him, through social media, to reach more potential donors in the run-up to 2020. And his war chest eventually could enable him to expand the electoral map into states such as Minnesota and Nevada, where Trump and the Nevada Republican Party are opening a headquarters on Tuesday. Democrats might also be limited in their own efforts to stretch the map in places such as Arizona, Georgia, and even Texas.

There is one area in which Democrats are not collectively sucking wind. Together, the party’s massive field of Democratic presidential candidates has out-raised Trump and the RNC. But that money is working at cross-purposes in a competitive primary. And the two candidates leading in the polls have given cause for concern about their fundraising in a general election.

Joe Biden, despite placing an emphasis on large-dollar fundraising, saw his numbers fall off in the third quarter, ending September with just $9 million on hand. Elizabeth Warren, whose own financial condition is healthier — she holds nearly $26 million — recently pledged to forego big-money fundraisers not only in the primary, but if she becomes the nominee.

Mark Longabaugh, a senior adviser to Bernie Sanders' 2016 presidential campaign, said Democrats’ potential fundraising imbalance with Trump “could be a huge challenge.”

“Trump and the Republicans are bankrolling an enormous amount of money, and they have no competitive primary, or very little of one,” he said. “I think it could be a struggle.”

But Longabaugh predicts the nomination will be settled “fairly quickly … pretty well done by the end of March,” in which case he said Democrats are “going to have a good amount of time to raise the resources that are necessary for the fall.”

Some Democratic campaign veterans fear the party is underestimating both the level of Trump’s preparations for 2020 and what it will take to unseat a sitting president. The level of preparation by Trump’s staff echoes Obama’s 2012 campaign, said Rufus Gifford, former finance director for Obama’s 2012 re-election.

“We were sophisticated, we were organized, and we were well-funded. This is everything the Trump operation is. Taking away his craziness, he has an extremely professional operation,” said Gifford, who has argued in recent days that Democrats like Warren need to lean more into fundraising if they want to compete against Trump in the general election.

"We have got to be prepared, six months from now or less, to make sure that the nominee’s political operation is ready to hit the ground running, and ready to do everything they can do” to defeat Trump, Gifford said.

Against the backdrop of a badly outgunned national party — the DNC had only $8.2 million on hand at the end of August, a fraction of the RNC’s nearly $54 million — only one major Democratic outside group has started spending money to counter the Trump campaign.

Priorities USA, the SuperPAC poised to spend the most on behalf of Democrats in the 2020 presidential cycle, started spending money this fall, training its firepower on four battleground states — Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Florida. Since July, according to Advertising Analytics, Priorities has spent $2.5 million on digital efforts in those four states.

The daunting sums raised by both the RNC and Trump in the third quarter is nothing compared to what Democrats are expecting Republicans will churn out by year’s end, said Priorities USA Executive Director Patrick McHugh.