As he gears up for a general election race, President Joe Biden’s campaign announced committees boosting his candidacy raised $71 million between July and September and holds $91 million spread across their accounts headed into the fall.
The announcement came as top Republican candidates began to report their fundraising hauls, with former President Donald Trump — the GOP primary’s frontrunner who is polling ahead of the field by large margins — announcing a haul of more than $45 million, with roughly $38 million in the bank across various committees. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis raised $15 million in the same period, according to his campaign, and former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley reporting an $11 million windfall.
Biden and most of his Republican would-be challengers had yet to file official campaign finance reports with the Federal Election Commission as of Sunday morning. Sunday is the deadline for those filings.
“This quarter’s fundraising haul and historic cash on hand speak to the very real enthusiasm and support President Biden and Vice President Harris continue to build for their reelection bid,” said Julie Chavez Rodriguez, Biden’s campaign manager, in a statement on Sunday. “These numbers are a testament to one of our core objectives early in this campaign: raise the resources needed to run an aggressive campaign that will win in November 2024.”
The Biden campaign raised over $72 million in between his campaign announcement at the end of April and June 30, the end of the last quarter.
Biden’s team argued the underlying fundamentals of their donor base and fundraising efforts has set them up for a sustained inflow of cash. Since the campaign officially launched, they brought on nearly a quarter million new donors who did not contribute to Biden’s 2020 effort and 112,000 supporters committed to donating every month through the election.
Roughly half of Biden’s fundraising between July and September, the year’s third quarter reporting period, was from the pockets of small donors. The campaign said 97% of donations that went to the president’s campaign committees and the Democratic National Committee were under $200, with $40 being the average contribution from those small donors. Meanwhile big donors were courted at 37 campaign fundraisers over that three month period.
At those fundraisers, Biden has previewed a campaign message highlighting threats to democracy from Trump and Republicans in the wake of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and Trump’s criminal prosecutions in Georgia and Washington, D.C., for his attempts to overturn the 2020 election.
“I'm running again. I think we've made progress. I think we have not only the ability to save our democracy, but increase its effectiveness,” Biden said at one fundraiser hosted by billionaire donors Mark Heising and Liz Simons in California last month. "Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans are determined to destroy this democracy”
"I'm optimistic that people in America know what's at stake and they're going to step up. We're always going to have ideological fights and that's legit. That's appropriate. But there's a set of rules called the constitution," he added.
The Biden campaign did not break down how much money flowed into each of the president’s fundraising entities and further clarity will not be available until his campaign finance filings are made public.
Trump’s campaign and affiliated committees raised $125 million over the same time period in his reelection bid. The last sitting president before that, Barack Obama, raised around $70 million in the same quarter during his second presidential run, nearly matching Biden even without adjusting for inflation.
The goal is to enter next year with a war chest bigger than any potential GOP rival to give Democrats a headstart on building out staff in key states and taking to the airwaves as the eventual nominee catches up.
“While Republicans continue to raise less money and bleed costs in a divisive primary, we are building the infrastructure necessary to aggressively reach voters with our message and compete in the general election,” said DNC Chair Jamie Harrison in a statement on Sunday.
Biden has held a single campaign rally so far, but has taken to the airwaves in battleground states and begun airing ads appealing to Black and Hispanic voters as he tries to maintain and grow his 2020 coalition.
In recent weeks, the campaign launched a $25 million advertising push, including a radio ad buy intended to woo Black voters in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and North Carolina — three states he won narrowly in 2020 and one, in North Carolina, he lost by a slim margin. Ads targeting middle-class families in battleground states have begun airing during NFL games and popular shows like “Dancing With the Stars” and “Bachelor in Paradise,” according to the campaign.
His team has also begun funneling money into social media, spending over $200,000 last week on Facebook ads alone, according to data from Meta.
Despite his lack of campaigning, Biden has continued to make the pitch on his economic agenda through official events across the country and sought to bolster his pro-union credentials by becoming the first president to join a picket line when he met with striking autoworkers in Michigan last month. The visit drew contrast with Trump’s speech at a non-union factory in the state where he told the United Auto Workers “your current negotiations don't mean as much as you think" and urged the union’s workers to convince their leaders to support him.
Otherwise, Biden has mostly focused on gearing up for a general election battle as primary challengers fail to gain traction and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. left the race to run as an independent last week.
Kennedy raised close to $9 million last quarter, ending with a little over $6 million in the bank, according to campaign finance reports. A super PAC boosting the longtime antivaccine crusader said they raised $11 million in the days after his announcement he would be running as an independent.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.