As he first publicly sought donors for his family foundation, and privately began weighing the possibility of making a third run for the Oval Office, former Vice President Joe Biden was more than a little rusty at fundraising.
“You all look dull as hell, I might add,” Biden told a group of would-be donors at a Biden Foundation event in 2017. “The dullest audience I have ever spoken to. Just sitting there, staring at me. Pretend you like me!”
Five years and more than $1 billion later, Biden and his team still haven’t quite gotten the hang of keeping donors happy. Texts go unanswered, advice goes unheeded, and outreach from the president’s senior advisors is, in the words of multiple organizers and fundraisers, “nonexistent.” But with Democrats staring down the barrel of a potentially historic defeat in the midterm elections in November, fundraisers frustrated both with the administration’s failure to achieve its policy goals and its steadfast refusal to keep them in the loop are slowly thawing their icy attitude towards the White House—if only to save the country.
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“There are plenty of people that were pissed, but they’re not going to risk democracy,” one Democratic organizer told The Daily Beast. “They’re not going to let Republicans win just because they didn’t get a thank-you call. They care about the things that they fought for.”
Biden, who sat in a safe Democratic seat in a small state for most of his Senate career and whose two prior campaigns for the White House ended before he could even begin to imagine managing a national fundraising strategy, has never been the most adept at what another longtime Democratic operative called “donor maintenance.” Despite that, and despite the coronavirus pandemic effectively canceling Biden’s in-person social calendar for almost the entirety of the general election campaign, nearly 800 bundlers brought in at least six figures for the run.
But those relationships didn’t carry on long past Inauguration Day—at least not in the way that some donors would have preferred. Unlike prior administrations, the Biden White House doesn’t have a designated point person for longtime financial supporters to contact with advice or concerns, and COVID-19 concerns have largely relegated even his most stalwart backers to Zoom calls and annual Christmas cards.
“The inauguration was an inauspicious beginning, in retrospect,” one bundler told The Daily Beast dryly. “Not getting invited to a party you’ve paid for is a bit on-the-nose.”
Internally, Biden administration officials have been almost proud of their decision to sidestep one of the grubbier aspects of the American political process. Frequent phone calls with wealthy supporters and well-connected bundlers, a mainstay in the previous administration, is snarkily dubbed “babysitting,” as one administration official put it, and Biden’s disinterest in being swayed by deep-pocketed donors is seen as a sign of his authenticity.
“It cuts both ways for the administration, like, it shows that they’re independent,” said the Democratic organizer (who, like most of the bundlers, operatives, donors and administration officials who spoke with The Daily Beast, requested to be attributed on background to speak candidly about a touchy subject). “Maybe that’s the strategy. Disagree with that, but whatever.”
But that dismissive view has grated off some of Biden’s biggest backers from 2020, who helped his campaign raise the most money in history despite the coronavirus pandemic effectively canceling the traditional wine-and-dine component of fundraising. In the early days of the administration, donors fumed about the lack of communication on ambassadorial nominees, on invitations to advisory boards relevant to their career specialties, and other perceived perks of being early supporters of the president’s campaign.
Those earlier gripes, however, have been set aside for more concrete frustrations regarding Biden’s ability to realize his ambitious domestic policy agenda. After Democrats failed to pass voting-rights legislation through the Senate last fall, Dr. Karla Jurvetson, one of the party’s single largest donors, briefly paused donations out of frustration, according to multiple bundlers. (A spokesperson for Jurvetson did not respond to a request for comment.)
“These people are engaged and terrified—especially the people that bundled in 2020,” another Democratic organizer said. “They put a ton of time and effort into what they thought was fixing the problem, or addressing the solution, and now it’s only getting worse. We have the president, but we don’t have anything else.”
Biden has recently appeared at a smattering of in-person fundraisers, and is tentatively slated to attend more as the summer fundraising season begins.
“There’s a lot at stake—a whole lot at stake,” Biden told attendees of a DNC fundraiser in Chicago earlier this month. “The rest of the world looks to us. They expect us to lead. We are the indispensable nation.”
But bundlers and strategists fear that it will take longer to warm up chilly relationships than Democrats have—particularly in vulnerable races.
“It's just demotivating, right?” said the longtime Democratic operative. “You build this group of people that are super motivated and engaged and then it goes cold. It just takes a while to reheat the fire and excite people. If they had kept the fires warm, maybe people would have been giving more to Senate candidates and congressional candidates and things would look different.”
“I’m not saying the political outcomes would look different,” they added, “but the fundraising stress that individual candidates are facing might be different, for sure.”
Plus, one major fundraiser said, reaching out to schedule a coffee klatsch after 18 months of relative radio silence makes the subtext of an implicitly transactional relationship a little too obvious.
“It’s like an affair,” they said. “The second everyone stops pretending not to know what’s happening, it starts to feel icky.”
A Biden advisor told The Daily Beast that the president is “focused on the work he and his administration are doing to lower prices and make our communities safer and strong, while ultra-MAGA Republicans want to raise taxes on the middle class, take away a woman’s right to reproductive healthcare, and oppose the Administration’s work to keep guns out of the hands of criminals.”
The advisor also noted thatI would note that the DNC has raised more than $54 million this year so far, a record for a midterm year.
“This overwhelming show of support from grassroots donors reflects the broad level excitement and support of President Biden's agenda,” they said.
With less than six months until the midterms, however, the wheels aren’t moving nearly as quickly as top Democrats would hope, even as the national party broke fundraising records last year. With the Republican National Committee outraising its Democratic counterpart last month, even Democrats who acknowledge the party’s cash-on-hand advantage say that it isn’t yet enough to stem what could be an electoral wipeout.
“Democrats are doomed for the midterms,” said John Morgan, a prominent Florida lawyer and high-level bundler for Biden’s campaign who was asked to host a Democratic National Committee fundraiser at his home, with Biden as the guest of honor.
“They decided it was all or nothing and got nothing,” Morgan said, summing up the party’s failure to pass much of its agenda despite holding the White House and both chambers of Congress. “It is baffling to me.”
