Prospective presidential candidates and their supporters are spending money like it’s 2016.

Groups allied with 15 of the top presidential prospects have raised $89 million and spent $87 million this election cycle as they gear up for 2016, with a focus on building campaign infrastructure and making inroads in key primary states, according to a POLITICO analysis of reports filed this month with the Federal Election Commission and Internal Revenue Service.

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The groups connected to Hillary Clinton alone have brought in $25 million.

POLITICO’s analysis included committees allied with prospective 2016 Democratic candidates Hillary Clinton, Martin O’Malley, Deval Patrick, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and possible 2016 Republicans Paul Ryan, John Bolton, Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee, Bobby Jindal, Rand Paul, Rick Perry, Marco Rubio and Rick Santorum.

(POLITICO's polling center)

The affiliated groups run the gamut from campaign committees to leadership PACs to technically independent super PACs to nonprofits, and mostly have stated purposes separate from 2016, including helping allies in their 2014 races. They have ramped up activity this summer, raising $16 million between July 1 and the end of September, and spending $5.4 million collecting data on donors, voters and grass-roots supporters.

Not long ago, that level of campaign finance activity would have been expected during the campaign itself, but the breakneck pace before the 2014 midterms hints at just how expensive it will be to build a top-tier presidential campaign operation in 2016.

Anyone hoping to be competitive most likely will have to bring in between $100 million and $150 million next year before the first voters even go to the polls, said Michael Toner, a former FEC Commissioner who served as a top lawyer on the presidential campaigns of Republicans George W. Bush in 2000, Fred Thompson in 2008 and Tim Pawlenty in 2012.

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“That’s just the entry fee,” Toner said. “It’s what you’re likely going to need to raise to organize on the ground simultaneously in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and other early states, while also getting on the ballot in those states, which is extremely onerous and expensive.”

Only one of the possible White House aspirants included in the analysis — Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin — is actually on the ballot Tuesday, and he faces only token opposition. But major swaths of the spending reflected in his finance reports — like that of the other groups analyzed — could unquestionably help form the foundation of a presidential campaign apparatus.

“The keys to being treated as a viable candidate are raising your national profile, building a network of donors and building a grass-roots network, and it takes money to do all those things,” said GOP lawyer and fundraiser Charlie Spies. In 2008 and 2012, Spies helped Mitt Romney that into a political sub-industry unto itself.

(POLITICO's 2014 race ratings)

The 2014 activity reflected in recent finance reports — likely the last full round of disclosures before candidates begin declaring for the presidency — offers a glimpse at how various politicians might approach their White House bids.

The strategies are as varied as the prospective candidates’ ideologies — from Florida Sen. Rubio’s flashy $400,000 in reported ad spending boosting 2014 candidates to the $1 million-plus think tank Louisiana Gov. Jindal’s allies created to promote his policy ideas to the populist barnstorming of Sens. Sanders of Vermont and Paul of Kentucky. In the third quarter, as they hopscotched the country rallying voters in targeted races (many of which just happened to be in key 2016 states), they racked up travel costs totaling $27,000 and $118,000, respectively, ranging from charter airfare ($11,000 for Sanders and $59,000 for Paul) to rental cars ($700 for Sanders and $3,000 for Paul).

Paul’s PAC even purchased $337.03 in “apparel” at the Men’s Wearhouse in Omaha, Nebraska, around the time the senator, whose offbeat wardrobe has been the subject of curiosity, swung through town en route to adjacent Iowa to campaign for Senate candidate Ben Sasse.

(Full 2014 election results)

Yet none of this is close to the money and activity behind Clinton.

If the former secretary of state and New York senator wins the Democratic nomination, the committees supporting her could raise $1.7 billion or more — far eclipsing the record-breaking $1.2 billion raised by those supporting President Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection, Toner predicted. In his estimation, Clinton’s campaign committee alone would have the potential to raise $1 billion, with an additional $500 million that could come into the Democratic Party committees, plus $200 million or more going to outside groups devoted to putting her in the White House.

“She is the 10,000-pound gorilla,” Toner said. Her mere presence in the primary “would likely have a ripple effect on how much money other candidates are going to have to raise in 2015 just to be in the ballgame.”

Allies of the putative Democratic front-runner have already built a shadow campaign operation unlike anything in modern American political history.

The committees that form the core of the Clinton machine — the super PACs Ready for Hillary, American Bridge and Priorities USA — combined with the idling Senate committee that houses her once-coveted (and still profitable) email list brought in $3.8 million in the third quarter alone. The groups spent $1.4 million in those three months reaching out to existing and potential supporters and donors.

Priorities USA, which was created to support Obama’s reelection, after 2012 morphed into the advertising arm of the Clinton apparatus, quietly building analytical models for an on-air assault to nuke any rival who challenges the former secretary of state. Last month, it spent $41,000 for research from NCEC Services Inc., which specializes in creating voter outreach strategies. It’s part of an effort “laying the groundwork to run the most data-driven, targeted independent expenditure in presidential campaign history,” boasted Priorities spokesman Peter Kauffmann.

Ready for Hillary, which set out to mobilize grass-roots support around a potential Clinton campaign, has the biggest overhead of any of the groups in this analysis. It has 35 staffers spread across 14 states and owns a bus that has been crisscrossing the country holding rallies. In the past three months, it paid nearly $650,000 in salary and human resource-related expenses and $227,000 in travel costs.

It’s building a voter file it hopes to use to benefit a potential Clinton campaign, and it paid $45,000 for data from the Democratic parties that host the first two primary contests — Iowa and New Hampshire. The group’s spokesman Seth Bringman said that data “enables us to develop an even more robust database of supporters who can be activated the moment Hillary makes a decision.”

The group has highlighted its small donor network — an area where Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign lagged behind Obama’s — but it has also worked to line up affluent Democrats to support Clinton. In the third quarter, it spent $160,000 on 10 different finance consultants, plus $596,000 on direct mail-related costs. Among the new donors from whom it received maximum $25,000 donations were private space travel entrepreneur Laetitia Garriott de Cayeux, ESPN executive Marie Donoghue (who oversees Nate Silver’s fivethirtyeight.com) and CarMax co-founder Austin Ligon.

O’Malley, the Maryland governor who is the Democrat most aggressively laying the groundwork for a potential challenge to Clinton, has been working assiduously to boost his national profile among donors and activists alike.