Major campaign donors and fundraisers act as a sort of shadow party in American politics, and on the Democratic side, they flexed their power like never before when it came to pressuring President Joe Biden to end his candidacy. Here, someone who describes themselves as “deeply involved in Democratic politics” recounts the roller coaster of the last month.
Take us back to early June to the weeks leading up to the debate. What was the predominant mood among major donors?
It was very much a wait-and-see period. I think people were worried. There was that George Clooney dinner in Los Angeles, where Obama kind of led the president off the stage. There were the incidents at the G7 summit. There were a bunch of issues reported in the press about the president’s acuity and physical condition. The sense among people that were meeting with him — in particular over the past year — was that he’d have good days and bad days: He was completely with it; he was a little out of it. Obviously, he was becoming physically more frail over time, but he certainly seemed to be with it.
So we were just waiting. We were just in the preparatory stage: beginning to organize groups of fellow donees, not putting dates on the calendar yet, but making sure that the network is in place. We realized that a lot of donors were focusing on the president’s performance at the debate, wondering which Joe Biden was going to show up in Atlanta that night in late June, whether he was up to the task of mounting a full-scale, continuous campaign against former President Trump.
Is that normal? What does June of an election year usually look like for you and other donors?
A lot of intense fundraising. Normally during this period you’d be raising hundreds of millions of dollars from your Democratic donor base and from grassroots efforts. The president would have been crisscrossing the country, but the president just really curtailed his schedule, and his internal advisers were really protecting him. It wasn’t good for fundraising. Usually you have the internal crew getting the candidate out and about and meeting with donors and traveling the country and pushing to raise as much money as possible before the push for the last three months. And that was not taking place here. Nothing was happening. We were waiting on the sidelines.
Were people trying to fundraise and it wasn’t working, or they weren’t trying?
Well, the Clooney-Obama event — that was a fundraiser. And in the spring, there was the event at Radio City with Clinton, Obama, and Biden. That was also a major fundraising event. But there weren’t a lot of the retail, smaller fundraising events where you’d raise $250,000 or a million dollars. They generally limited the events to very, very big tickets; very staged; carefully choreographed events where they could raise a lot — like, tens of millions of dollars.
The debate happens. We all know how that went. I imagine you started getting a lot of texts.
I think everyone who was involved was getting texts. And it was a sense of Oh my God, I can’t believe this is happening. Disbelief. This is never going to work. What are we going to do? What is the Democratic Party going to do? How is this all going to play out? You’re essentially four months away from the November election, so you had very, very little time to figure this out. Then there was a sense of We’ve got to do something.
By the end of that Thursday evening, you didn’t know who was going to be at the top of the ticket. It was that catastrophic. It’s impossible to raise money if you don’t know who the candidate’s going to be.
This is probably a stupid question, but why not?
If the party nominated someone crazy. I’m not sure you’d want to say, “I’m raising money for, you know, a candidate to be determined later.” You could give money to the DNC and basically say, “I trust you to put up a candidate who we’re going to support,” but I think that generally isn’t what happens. I’m sure there are mainstream conventional Republicans who, in 2016, were giving money to the RNC and never in their wildest dreams imagined that Trump would be the candidate. And they’re probably like, Oh my God, I cannot believe I contributed to Trump’s candidacy.
What were you hearing from fellow donors at that point?
Initially, among leading Democratic donors, it was another wait-and-see process: You’re expecting Joe Biden to do the right thing and step aside and protect the party and the country, or, alternatively, you’re expecting leadership to do the right thing and persuade Joe Biden to step aside. As the days played out and the echoes began to get louder, you thought there was going to be movement. And then the assassination attempt takes place and everything stops for a period of time, in part out of respect. And you wonder, Oh God, is this really going to be the mismatch? This deeply flawed, dangerous Republican candidate against Joe Biden, who really did not appear that he could survive a presidential campaign. And then folks within the Democratic-donor leadership became very frustrated.
In the hours, days, and — as it turned out — weeks that followed, the sense of frustration among leading Democrats and donors was: “What is party leadership doing about this?” “Who is going to be at the top of the ticket?” We certainly don’t want a Trump administration. And you certainly don’t want a Trump administration with Republicans in control of both the Senate and the House. And over time, the crescendo built.
What did that look like?
It was telling leadership, “You know, if you don’t do something about this, forget the presidential race — you cannot look to us to raise money for the Senate and House candidates. You have to do something.” Remember, there are essentially three buckets of money. You’re looking at House races, which you knew would be tight. You need to raise money for Senate races, which, from a demographic perspective, you knew was going to be tough because of the way the map was structured. And then you have the presidential election.
Were the major donors on the same page about what needed to happen?There was a lot of chatter among Democratic donors, and we were trying to figure out what to do. We were asking, “Can anyone get to the president directly or through indirect means to say, ‘The money train has stopped — and unless there’s a change, it’s not going to resume its activity’?” A lot of us thought, We just have to be hard-asses. And if the president doesn’t resign, we’re out this cycle. But I was hearing from some people who said, “We can’t do that because then you’re ceding all three levers of power to the Republicans led by Trump.” Those were very painful, deeply profound conversations.
If there ended up being no change at the top of the ticket, there’s no way that leading donors would have sabotaged the party in the country. We would have raised the funds. But I think it was an effort at crass power politics through the fundraising mechanism.
How much do you think that was what moved the needle?
I think it was a material factor. Both the fact that the donor coffers were closed not just to President Biden — you can’t run a campaign if you don’t have hundreds of millions, if not a billion or 2 billion dollars — but to Democratic leadership, who want to make sure that the Democrats maintain control, or at least fight to maintain control, of the Senate and House. You can’t run those campaigns if you don’t have tremendous financial resources behind you. So at that point, it looked as if the well had dried out. There was no possibility of running contested elections.
How much were you in touch with Democratic Party leadership during all this?
I should be careful here.
Did you feel like you had special insight on what was going on in the White House?
Oh, you never really know. I talked to a lot of people. I was speaking regularly to one member of Democratic leadership. But you don’t quite know what the president is thinking. He’s got Jill and Hunter. He’s got Ricchetti and Donilon and Klain. But it’s a really small and insular group, and unless you’re on the inside, you don’t really know what’s going on.
So Biden announces he’s stepping aside and then, 27 minutes later, endorses Harris. And money starts pouring in.
It was surprising. We went from a standing start — I mean, there was zero, if not negative, momentum — to raising $120 million in two days, $200 million–plus in six days. And it was grassroots, too — not the big-money folks. I think 60 to 70 percent came from first-time donors. It was like when you shake a can of soda, and you shake it and shake it and shake it and shake it and shake it. The minute you lift up the tab, you’re gonna have an explosion. That’s what happened. Everyone was so upset and uptight and depressed. Then, finally, there’s a candidate and everyone instantaneously coalesces around that candidate and you have this explosion of support.
How much of that is excitement among donors for Kamala specifically, and how much is excitement for Not Biden?
I think it’s a combination of both. I don’t think it’s simply, Thank God President Biden stepped aside, period, full stop. I think there’s a lot of excitement around the fact that you have a very capable, dynamic, experienced candidate.
So in terms of fundraising, how does this moment we’re in now compare to July of a normal election year?
This feels a lot like Barack Obama in 2008. You have a dynamic leader receiving extraordinary grassroots support and generating enormous enthusiasm from the core bases of the Democratic Party coalition.
I think there’s generally a parallel between grassroots support for a candidate and big-donor big-money support for a candidate. Because what you’re looking for is excitement, enthusiasm, and a path to victory, and often, the best barometer of a path to victory is grassroots support and money pouring in. There aren’t a lot of proxies — I mean, there’s polling data. You would have expected that Trump would have had an enormous spike, having survived an assassination attempt, having picked a vice-president, and having emerged from a Republican convention with zero opposition and 100 percent support. And all of that momentum has been stymied over the past week.
The donors will start having fundraisers, and a lot of them will be virtual because it’s less than 100 days from Election Day, and that way you can be much more efficient. Our goal is to raise just a boatload of money as quickly as possible. Again, it’s going to be for the top of the ticket and senatorial and House races. I mean, take the Casey-McCormick race in Pennsylvania. It’s the most expensive Senate race, or non-presidential race, in the history of electoral politics and will be hundreds of millions of dollars.
