2020 election: How Biden became the unlikely star of online fundraising

Long before Joe Biden was smashing online fundraising records, long before it was clear he would become the Democratic nominee, his campaign was facing a serious cash crisis.

It was late summer 2019 and Mr Biden’s online fundraising had slowed to such a trickle that his team basically had to shut down its digital advertising programme. His aides knew the choice was self-defeating: no more online ads meant no more finding new donors. 

The campaign bottomed out in early September 2019 when Mr Biden raised just $24,124.17 (£18,618.19) online in a day.

Now? On one recent day, Mr Biden was raising more than that every two minutes.

The unlikely transformation of Mr Biden, a 77-year-old whose seemingly limited appeal to small donors left him financially outflanked in the primaries, into perhaps the greatest magnet for online money in American political history is a testament to the ferocity of Democratic opposition to Donald Trump.

In a little over a year, the former vice president’s online fundraising had increased 1,000-fold, to $24.1m (£18.5m) on 30 September.

Mr Biden now has a once-unimaginable cash edge over Mr Trump, and since 1 September he has reserved about $140m (£108m) more in television advertising than the president. Money alone does not determine presidential winners — Hillary Clinton vastly outspent Mr Trump in 2016 — but the cash has provided Mr Biden enviable flexibility to engineer the electoral map to his advantage.

There was always going to be a large amount of money coming into the nominee,” said Michael Whitney, a Democratic digital fundraising specialist who worked for senator Bernie Sanders in the primary. “I’m sure they never dreamed it would be this big.”

To chart Mr Biden’s consequential financial turnabout, the New York Times analysed the flow of nearly 11 million online contributions from the first nearly 500 days of his campaign. The analysis looked at $436m (£336.1m) given through August to Mr Biden and his shared committee with the Democratic National Committee via ActBlue, the donation-processing platform. Checks, merchandise sales and other offline giving were not included.

The Times analysis shows four inflection points in Mr Biden’s fundraising metamorphosis, beginning with one unwittingly provided last fall by Mr Trump, whose presidency has been rocket fuel for Democratic fundraising.

The other three points — all linked in different ways to race — emerge from the 2020 data: Mr Biden’s sweeping victories delivered by black voters in South Carolina and on Super Tuesday, the protests after the police killing of George Floyd and, especially, the selection of senator Kamala Harris as his running mate.

Ms Harris, in particular, turbocharged his fundraising. Mr Biden’s previous high for online donations in a day had been 102,143 contributions. On 11 August, the day he picked Ms Harris, he received 252,982. The day after, he topped 300,000.

Mr Biden’s committees raised a record-shattering $364.5m (£281.1m) in August, including $205m (£158.1m) online. Then he bested that total in September, raising $383m (£295.3m), he announced on Wednesday.

Teddy Goff, a top digital strategist for Ms Clinton in 2016 and Barack Obama in 2012, called those sums “shocking amounts”.

“It wasn’t at all clear that a candidate who didn’t spend the last decade building an email fundraising list, and who isn’t associated with the movement wing of the party, would have such flabbergasting success,” he said.

This is how it happened.

Trump’s Ukraine call sparked impeachment — and Biden’s fundraising

The first event that reversed Mr Biden’s financial trajectory came not long after he had scrapped his ad budget: the September 2019 news that Mr Trump had pressured the president of Ukraine to investigate Mr Biden’s son. That act eventually spurred the president’s impeachment. For many Democratic primary voters, it also was a blunt reminder of Mr Biden’s polling strength against Mr Trump.

In the 40 days before the call burst into view, on 20 September 2019, Mr Biden had raised about $62,500 (£48,215) online per day, on average; in the 40 days that followed, he averaged over $159,000 (£122,661).

It was something of a financial lifeboat. Over the previous three months, Mr Biden had been spending more than he raised, depleting his cash reserves. The extra $100,000 (£77,145) a day helped keep the campaign afloat, officials said.

Kate Bedingfield, a deputy campaign manager for Mr Biden, said that Mr Trump’s seeking help from Ukraine “made it clear to the whole world which candidate he feared facing most”.

“And we capitalised on that in a way that produced real results,” she said.

Mr Biden’s average daily haul would never again dip below the six-figure mark.

Still, Mr Biden mostly plodded along financially the rest of the pre-primary season. He averaged raising $169,059 (£130,423) per day online last October, $136,518 (£105,318) in November, $128,912 (£99,451) in December and $168,674 (£130,126) in January.

In other words, there was no growth.

At the same time, donations to his rivals ballooned. By late February, Mr Biden was teetering politically and had spent only the sixth most of the Democratic field.

South Carolina resurrected Biden

Then came South Carolina.

With Mr Sanders threatening to seize control of the primary, black voters gave Mr Biden a decisive victory — and online money rained down: more than $5m (£3.8m) on 29 February and $5m the next day. Days later, Mr Biden swept through Super Tuesday to amass a delegate lead he would never relinquish.

Mr Biden would raise $25.3m (£19.5m) online over seven days — more than he had in the previous four months.

Just as significant, Mr Biden’s fundraising floor was suddenly and permanently higher — even as the coronavirus pandemic soon froze American life. He averaged about $615,000 (£474,463) per day until Mr Sanders dropped out in early April; the rest of that month, Mr Biden’s daily average jumped to $1.1m (£848,633).

Mr Biden’s email and text lists were still excruciatingly small for a presumptive nominee. “A lot of people were pessimistic about the Biden campaign’s ability to ramp up their digital campaign because they were not as sophisticated in the primary as other candidates,” said Tara McGowan, a Democratic digital strategist.

Mr Biden’s new campaign manager, Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, rushed to make up ground. She cast aside a proposal to outsource much of the digital operations to a firm, Hawkfish, created by billionaire Michael Bloomberg, and instead went on a hiring and spending spree. Almost 40 per cent of Mr Biden’s April outlays — $4.7m (£3.6m) of $12m (£9.2m) — went into ads seeking new supporters online, according to federal records and campaigns officials.

The investments were approved even as the economy cratered, other campaign departments clamoured to expand and the payoff seemed uncertain.

“People were nervous and scared,” said Rob Flaherty, the campaign’s digital director. “Politics was a secondary thing.”

Donations stagnated at first despite the spending, and even regressed. In the first weeks of May, Mr Biden’s daily online haul had dipped below $775,000 (£597,815), despite nearly a third of the campaign’s total budget going into donor prospecting.

Floyd’s killing prompted an outpouring

In the first weeks of May, the Biden campaign was regularly at risk of missing internal digital fundraising goals, according to an official familiar with the matter, and often needed external boosts to help hit its metrics.

Then came the video of Floyd’s death that set off nationwide protests against police brutality and racial injustice.

Millions of dollars spontaneously flooded into racial justice groups and black-led organisations — and also Mr Biden’s coffers. On 27 May, Mr Biden raised $1.3m (£1m), starting his first-ever two-week stretch of days above $1m.

On 2 June, Mr Biden delivered his first speech outside his home since the pandemic froze campaign activities, speaking in Philadelphia on race relations the day after the Trump administration had used smoke, flash grenades and chemical spray to clear peaceful protesters outside the White House for a photo op. More than $3.2m (£2.4m) poured in — Mr Biden’s biggest day since the week of Super Tuesday.

Hate-giving is a well-known phenomenon for Democratic donors in the Trump era, and Biden becoming the vessel to take down Trump has been a financial boon.

Harris’ impact was astronomical

Mr Biden’s choice for his running mate was a closely guarded secret by the campaign’s inner sanctum leading up to Ms Harris’ August unveiling. A special Slack channel was set up, with a slowly expanding list of people invited on a need-to-know basis, hour by hour. The goal was to break the news via text message.

But a minute before the text went out, the Biden-Harris campaign website accidentally went live, according to campaign officials, although the mix-up went undetected.

The rush of money that followed was staggering.

The selection of Ms Harris proved so popular, so quickly, that the campaign opened a new fulfilment centre just for yard signs. More than $48m (£37m) flooded into the campaign in those heady first 48 hours, roughly 80 per cent from online — by the end of the month, all 14 of Mr Biden’s biggest days for online fundraising had come after forming the Biden-Harris ticket.

In one notable move, the Biden campaign sent news of Ms Harris’ selection to the full dormant list of the DNC, something campaigns are generally averse to doing out of fear of tripping spam filters, and again after her convention speech. Those two emails, campaign officials said, reactivated 875,000 supporters.

The Biden campaign raised an average of $8.1m (£6.2m) a day online in the last three weeks of August, after Ms Harris’ selection and during the two national conventions. That is $2.5m (£1.9m) more than its previous biggest day.

“In digital, our job is to make windmills,” said Flaherty, the digital director. “The candidate has to make the wind.”

New York Times