Less than three months after announcing his re-election campaign, President Joe Biden’s fundraising operation more than doubled what each of the top two Republican primary campaigns raised during the second quarter of 2023.
The Biden-Harris campaign on Friday announced that it had pulled in more than $72m over the 67-day period running from 25 April, when Mr Biden formally declared his candidacy for re-election, to the end of June.
The campaign also reported that it currently has $77m in cash on hand, which it said is a larger war chest than any Democratic presidential candidate has had at this point in an election cycle in history.
The $72m brought in by the president’s re-election campaign is more than double the $35m raised by former president Donald Trump’s campaign during full 90-day period running from 1 April to 30 June, and more than triple the $25m which Mr Trump’s closest primary rival, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, raised during the second quarter.
Democratic National Committee chair Jamie Harrison attributed the deficit between Mr Biden’s fundraising haul and that of his GOP rivals to “the cost of running on an extreme and unpopular agenda” and predicted that the Republicans, who he said are “significantly under our fundraising pace, with less cash on hand, and are bleeding costs to raise the money they are reporting,” would be left “deeply unprepared” to counter the Democrats’ operation.
The campaign said the $72m represented funds raised between the actual campaign committee, the Democratic National Committee, and the joint fundraising committees established by Mr Biden’s campaign and the DNC, and included 670,000 donations by more than 394,000 donors across all 50 states, 97 per cent of whom gave less than $200.
In a statement, Biden-Harris campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez said her team has seen “incredible enthusiasm” for the administration’s agenda since Mr Biden and Ms Harris launched their re-election bid and contrasted their efforts with the GOP primary fight between Mr Trump, Mr DeSantis and their other lower-polling rivals.
While Republicans are burning through resources in a divisive primary focused on who can take the most extreme MAGA positions, we are significantly outraising every single one of them – because our team’s strength is our grassroots supporters,” she said. “Americans know the stakes in this election — and our broad, diverse coalition powered by grassroots donors is going to send Joe Biden and Kamala Harris back to the White House to finish the job”.
