WASHINGTON — In a nationally broadcast interview Monday, President Joe Biden pushed back on rich Democrats who want him to end his reelection campaign, saying, “I don’t care what the millionaires think.”
Small donors, he made clear, were coming through for him.
But hours later, Biden joined a private call with his top donors and fundraisers to reassure them. “It matters,” he told them of their support.
The seemingly contradictory messages show the conundrum facing the president as he grapples with the fallout from his disastrous debate performance against former President Donald Trump last month. To continue to fund his presidential campaign, Biden will most likely need the support of wealthy Democratic Party backers, but they have been among the loudest voices calling for him to end his bid for reelection.
In trying to defuse their opposition, Biden — a politician who has long relied on the party’s establishment to fund his campaign — has adopted a surprisingly populist antielite message that, in some ways, echoes Trump’s.
Major donors are warning that the party will lose the White House and downballot races with Biden atop the ticket. A growing chorus of donors has been pushing — first quietly, then publicly — for him to step aside to allow a replacement nominee and threatening to withhold their cash unless that happens.
While Biden’s campaign has continued to court wealthy Democrats, including working to schedule fundraising receptions despite uncertain interest, the president has also publicly cast the backlash from major donors as a sign that he is sticking up for regular people against moneyed interests. But polls show that many rank-and-file Democratic voters also have deep concerns about his age.
“The voters — and the voters alone — decide the nominee of the Democratic Party,” he wrote in a letter to congressional Democrats on Monday morning. “Not the press, not the pundits, not the big donors, not any selected groups of individuals, no matter how well intentioned.”
In an interview on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Monday, Biden said, “I’m getting so frustrated by the elites” and singled out major donors. “I want their support, but that’s not the reason I’m running,” he said.
The defiant message comes amid a new financial reality for his campaign.
If Biden forges ahead, he will most likely need to rely on small donors to offset the retreat of major givers as the race enters a stretch of intense spending on advertising and voter mobilization.
If he is able to harness antielite sentiment in the party’s small donor base to ride out the post-debate turmoil, it would put him in the company of more populist politicians such as Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga. Those lawmakers have generated waves of cash from small donors by invoking perceived mistreatment at the hands of the establishment.
“We do know that high-visibility, high-intensity moments can trigger an immediate flood of small donations and that anger, resentment and outrage are powerful motivators in politics, including for small donors,” Richard H. Pildes, a law professor at New York University who has studied the role of small donors in fueling political polarization, said in an email. “It’s also possible we are seeing a conflict between the base of the Democratic Party, who want Biden to stay in, and the more ‘elite’ faction of large donors, who want an alternative.”
Small donors have long been valued in politics as an indicator of grassroots enthusiasm as well as a sustainable source of cash, since they can give repeatedly without reaching contribution limits. Advances in online, email and mobile fundraising applications have allowed campaigns to use big events as opportunities to solicit contributions from supporters of average means.
Small donors tend to give “from the heart,” said Eitan D. Hersh, a professor of political science at Tufts University who has studied the motivations of political donors. “The bigger donors are donating more from the head than the heart,” he said, predicting that Biden’s campaign would experience “a retreat of big donors and therefore a relative gain in proportion of small donors.”
Carol L. Hamilton, a lawyer in Los Angeles who is a member of Biden’s national finance committee, said he had many supporters who “may not be million-dollar donors or hundred-thousand-dollar donors, but they care, and they’re going to vote, and right now they’re showing that they support our president by giving a few bucks — $5, $25, whatever it is they’re giving — to make a statement that they think that this president should stay in the race.”
Hamilton participated in the donor call with the president Monday and said “the people I talked to were very reassured by him on that call.” She questioned how many major donors had abandoned Biden. “We haven’t seen a mass exodus at all,” she said. “I mean, there have been a few people, yes, that’s true.”
In the hours after the call, Biden’s campaign said it received a maximum $929,600 donation to its joint fund with Democratic Party committees from former retail executive Peter Lowy. The campaign also sent a fundraising email asking for $25 contributions, which it has called “the most popular donation amount to emails like this one.”
“We know that $25 doesn’t seem like much in the face of Trump’s millions,” the message said. “But we promise that your $25 — matched with the support of the thousands of people who are chipping in right now — makes all the difference.”
In a statement Tuesday, Charles Lutvak, a spokesperson for the Biden campaign, said, “Our grassroots donors have shown up in full force, setting records again and again over the last two weeks, and across our entire donor base, we will continue to raise the money needed to dominate Donald Trump on the ground and on the airwaves to win in November.”
Biden has raised more money from small donors than Trump so far this cycle, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan watchdog site OpenSecrets. That is a reversal from their 2020 faceoff.
In 2016, when the Republican establishment largely aligned against Trump, he touted his small-dollar fundraising while criticizing major donors. Even then, he quietly courted those same wealthy activists.
In the 24 hours after his conviction in May on 34 felony counts, Trump’s campaign stoked its small donor base, raising nearly $53 million and shattering online records for Republicans. The haul helped him close a fundraising gap and pull ahead of Biden, who had maintained a financial advantage through most of the campaign.
On the strength of his post-conviction surge, Trump and his party started June with $235 million in the bank, while Biden and his party had $212 million.
In June, thanks to his fundraising after the debate, the president outraised Trump but still entered this month with less cash on hand: $285 million for Trump’s operation versus $240 million for Biden.
Small donors provided nearly 80% of the $38 million the Biden campaign raised in the four days after the debate, including two of its best grassroots fundraising days of the 2024 cycle, according to the campaign. Overall, it said, the best fundraising month was June, bringing in $127 million, nearly two-thirds of which came from grassroots donors.
Campaign finance reports detailing the fundraising will not become publicly available until later this month.
An analysis by OpenSecrets of campaign finance filings from earlier in the race shows that Biden raised a much lower percentage of funds — about 43% — from small donors, generally regarded as those who give $200 or less.
Biden claimed on “Morning Joe” that “97% of all the people contributed to us are people making under $200 — contributed under $200.” He called that “the largest contingent ever in history. I’m not positive of that, but I think that’s true.” (The claim is difficult to independently check, because campaigns are not required to disclose individual donors who give $200 or less.)
John Morgan, a lawyer in Florida who said he raised more than $1 million for the Biden campaign, said in a text message that he did not believe an increase in small donations would offset the defection of major donors.
But Morgan, who was planning a summer fundraiser for Biden that is now in flux, predicted that major donors would return to the president’s camp if he stayed in the race.
“If not,” he wrote, “Trump wins.”