Joe Biden may be resisting calls for him to step aside, but the revolt within the Democratic Party continues.
Biden can dig in his heels and refuse to exit the race, but it won’t do him much good if donors don’t ante up and supply him with the cash to make a race of it. And that’s exactly what’s happening.
To assuage the fears and frets of big-money donors, Biden assigned his vice president, Kamala Harris, to rally the troops and get them to open their wallets. She initiated a Zoom call with donors.
As PJ Media’s Matt Margolis pointed out, it was a “disaster.”
“It was a total failure,” said one source who was on the call and who spoke on the condition of anonymity to provide a candid assessment. “It was damaging. It was poor planning.”
Hey! That sounds like Harris’s 2020 presidential run.
Some donors were put off by the pressure tactics of the Biden campaign.
“Please help us turn down the volume on this conversation publicly,” Melissa Morales, founder and president of Somos Votantes, said on the call, according to a transcript obtained by NBC News. “It’s time to stop the leaks and the rampant rumors. Your message has been heard and received. But every day that we continue this publicly chaotic conversation, we come closer to a loss — no matter who the nominee is.”
Donors don’t care about the leaks as much as they care about winning. And there doesn’t seem to be a strategy about where the campaign should go from here.
“I don’t know how you campaign with a broadening electoral map without money. I don’t know what they’re doing. I don’t know,” one major Democratic donor told CNN on Friday. “I’ve never seen this strategy where you think you can win without money.”
This donor mused that perhaps the campaign can get away with digging in for a few more weeks under the current circumstances, but that anything longer would become extraordinarily difficult.
They also noted that the emails from the campaign for events and fundraisers have significantly slowed in recent weeks: “They seem far and few between,” they said.
Still, the Biden campaign has boasted record-breaking grassroots fundraising.
Meanwhile, Republicans boasted the best fundraising month in years in June, according to the Washington Post, as Trump surpassed Biden’s once enormous cash advantage.
The RNC raised more than $66 million in June, according to filings submitted Saturday night to the Federal Election Commission. That sum marks the highest amount raised for the committee since late 2020, when Donald Trump’s false claims of voter fraud in that year’s election propelled hundreds of millions of dollars of giving in a matter of weeks.
“He will be doing big fundraisers and focusing on continuing to bolster grassroots fundraising,” Biden campaign spokesperson Kevin Munoz said on MSNBC on Saturday. That’s all well and good. Grassroots giving can be very helpful in the long run. But you still need the whales to write the multi-million dollar checks.
James Carville is wondering how the campaign can possibly succeed with all the negatives surrounding it.
“What they are asking is, ‘How are you going to win this?’” he said of the people he had spoken to. “No one is over it, and we are moving ahead anyway.”
