Joe Biden‘s campaign was designed to bury Donald Trump in an avalanche of cash.
Instead, his allies are preparing for a slugfest without the benefit of a fatter wallet as financial reports show Trump has outpaced Biden in consecutive months, raking in huge sums following his 34 felony convictions and erasing Biden’s long-standing financial lead.
Democrats have largely downplayed Trump’s new financial advantage in recent days, in the same way Trump’s allies had done when Biden was ahead in the money race — saying the president would have enough money to compete.
But privately, several Democratic strategists and donors were reeling.
“There was the strategy to raise all this money up front so we could have a huge head start,” said one Biden bundler, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly. “The whole point was to come out with a significant monetary advantage, and you know, we’re even now and it’s June. … I have no word for it other than ‘depression’ among Biden supporters.”
Another major Biden bundler, who was also granted anonymity, called the development “disappointing, but not surprising.”
In the 2024 money race, Trump not only outdid Biden, but also had more money on hand. And Republican megadonors have also rolled out huge checks for Trump in recent days, including $50 million from former GOP donor Timothy Mellon to a pro-Trump super PAC.
Several Biden donors insisted they expected — and planned — for Trump to close the gap after clinching the Republican nomination, compared to when Mitt Romney overtook then-President Barack Obama in fundraising in the summer of 2012. Part of the disparity between the campaigns was that Biden spent more money and built “an incredible campaign structure in battleground states,” while “Trump has done nothing,” says Chip Forrester, co-chair of the Biden-Harris Southern Finance Committee.
“That early money counted because it allowed Biden to build all these offices, which have been growing for a while, and that’s not something that Trump can catch up to,” said Alan Kessler, a Pennsylvania-based donor. “Trump can’t get back February, March, April and May, when the Biden campaign took off.”
The Trump campaign, in turn, has described the state’s infrastructure as “leaner,” relying much more heavily on outside groups to run it.
Within the Biden campaign, aides said May was their second-best fundraising month of the campaign, both overall and in terms of grassroots fundraising, even without a major fundraising event. Like their donors, they pointed to their battlefield workforce, which includes 200 offices and a thousand employees, as money well spent.
“Our campaign, from the moment we started, has been more focused on what we do with our resources, rather than trying to play a game of who will raise what,” Quentin Fulks, Biden’s deputy campaign manager, said in a statement. interview. with POLITICS. “That’s where our investments go, straight to the field [operations].”
It wasn’t all bad news for Biden on the fundraising front. The Biden campaign experienced a recovery in its own fundraising in May, after a weak performance in April. Biden also had to contend with former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg, who donated $19 million to a pro-Biden super PAC and this week gave a maximum donation of $1 million to the campaign.
The campaign raised nearly $40 million last week after a glitzy event in Los Angeles and another in northern Virginia. Kessler said a fundraiser with First Lady Jill Biden in Philadelphia, scheduled for Monday, is already sold out and “we are putting people on the waiting list.”
And the Biden campaign suggested that the latest reports do not fully account for its financial strength. The campaign said it had $212 million in cash on hand, based on the combined amounts of their joint fundraising committees. The Trump campaign has not yet released the joint fundraising totals and neither can be verified until July, when those committees file with the Federal Elections Commission.
“I don’t think any of these candidates are going to lose because of a lack of resources,” said Howard Wolfson, Bloomberg’s top political adviser. “I think they will have fully funded campaigns that will have more than enough resources to get their message across.”
But for the first time in the general election campaign, Biden is trailing in the money race. In the reports filed Thursday evening, Trump and the Republican National Committee were sitting on $116.5 million in cash, while Biden and the Democratic National Committee have $91.6 million in the bank.
Brian Hughes, a Trump campaign spokesman, said: “From fundraising, poll numbers, crowds at public events or enthusiasm across the board among American voters, there is mounting evidence that President Trump’s momentum coming out of a historic primary season is growing as we move into November. The latest fundraising surge and wipeout of the cash benefit from the campaign in May reflects this.”
While Democrats argued that Trump’s election in May was a one-off event that convinced him that small-dollar donors were under pressure, that may not be the case with his sentencing scheduled for July, which would bring a new flow of money could cause. Democrats also pointed to the upcoming June 27 presidential debate as a moment that could boost online donations and grassroots fundraising.
But there is a bubbling frustration among some Democrats that donors who wrote big checks for Biden in 2020 are now keeping their wallets closed. At least two bundlers expressed concerns about donors “sitting on the sidelines,” said one of those donors, who was granted anonymity to discuss the matter candidly.
‘We need a few more [donors] to come online, and I think that will happen,” said Bradley Beychok, co-founder of American Bridge, one of the main pro-Biden super PACs. “We need everyone on the pitch, involved and doubling what they did in 2020. We have some new people coming on their side, and we have some new people on our side.”
On Trump’s grassroots donors, Biden communications director Michael Tyler, in a statement to POLITICO, attacked the former president for “getting small-dollar donors to give their hard-earned money to pay for a convicted felon’s legal fees — and not spending a dime to talk for real voters.”
But even if the dollar amounts Trump has raised don’t panic Democratic circles, they are deeply disturbed by the support these contributions represent.
“What Democrats should be concerned about is that it’s even within a certain distance — that the money is getting to Trump’s side in such a short period of time,” said Hank Sheinkopf, a longtime Democratic strategist lives in New York. “You would think a man convicted of crimes would be nowhere, but financially he is everywhere. And that’s a real problem for Democrats.”
He said: “The challenger shouldn’t even be close in terms of money, especially if he has been convicted of crimes. How is this possible, Democrats should ask themselves. … They should be concerned about that.”
Alex Isenstadt contributed to this report.
