President Joe Biden’s re-election campaign may see a 50-percent reduction in fundraising in July as donors worry about his chances in a November matchup against former president Donald Trump, NBC News reported Wednesday.
Four individuals close to the Biden campaign told NBC News that fundraising numbers are “already disastrous” and that “the money has absolutely shut off,” while one source said a call between Biden and major donors “seemed so contrived” that financiers did not “buy it.”
NBC News reported that some of the campaign’s most successful fundraisers have declined to contact deep-pocketed networks out of fear that Biden will not ultimately lead the Democratic Party’s presidential ticket this fall.
“You can’t reach out to someone, because someone could say, ‘Geez, I didn’t know, he has dementia,'” NBC News quotes a top Biden bundler as saying.
The NBC News story comes in the wake of actor and major fundraiser George Clooney’s New York Times op-ed in which Clooney called on Biden to leave the race. Multiple entertainment-industry donors have said similar things since the June 27 debate, with Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings — who has contributed over $20 million to the Democratic Party — arguing that the president “needs to step aside.”
Abigail Disney, granddaughter of Walt Disney Company co-founder Roy Disney, said she will refrain from giving to the Democratic Party until Biden drops out of presidential contention. Karla Jurvetson, a major donor, said on a private call last week that she agrees with the notion of pausing contributions until the party picks a new nominee.
A Biden campaign spokeswoman told NBC News that the idea that donations are down is “not accurate,” pointing to a spike in contributions immediately after the debate. However, the sources close to the campaign who spoke with NBC News said donations declined fairly rapidly after that initial uptick.
One Biden donor, according to the report, worries that the president’s campaign is repeating mistakes made by Hillary Clinton in 2016 — concocting flawed assessments of the candidate’s standing in the race and ignoring data.