WASHINGTON • Democratic presidential front runner Joe Biden is working the phones with top donors while cloistered in his Delaware home. His digital team is searching for the right tone to ask small contributors for cash during the sharpest economic downturn in their lifetimes.
And his finance operation is plotting how to keep the cheques coming when catered parties for big contributors are on hold - indefinitely.
Top Biden fund-raisers and donors, as well as campaign, super PAC - political action committee - and Democratic Party officials, described urgent efforts to re-imagine the ways they raise money during a pandemic and global economic slowdown. And in nearly two dozen interviews, they expressed deepening concern that the downturn could choke off the flow of small online donations as millions of people lose their jobs.
The coronavirus shut down much of the American economy just as the former United States vice-president took control of the Democratic presidential race, upending plans to consolidate support among party donors who had previously supported other candidates and diminishing his ability to replenish his cash reserves to compete with President Donald Trump's well-funded re-election campaign.
Mr Trump began last month with an enormous financial advantage over the Democrats: a combined roughly US$225 million (S$323 million) in cash on hand between his re-election campaign, the Republican National Committee and their shared committees.
Mr Biden and the Democratic National Committee had only US$20 million after accounting for debts.
Mr Biden's campaign has not said how much money he has raised since mid-March, when the virus began taking its toll on the country, but fund-raisers said giving was slowing and they were reluctant to make aggressive requests for cash at this fragile time as the campaign itself readies for a 100 per cent virtual and digital operation.
These should be some of the busiest and headiest days for Mr Biden and his fund-raising team in normal times, now that he has knocked out all of his rivals but Senator Bernie Sanders. But instead he has found himself holed up in Wilmington, Delaware, and limited so far to three video fund-raisers from a makeshift studio in his house.
"It is definitely harder to raise money now," said Mr Mathew Littman, a former Biden speechwriter in California organising a video fund-raiser. "You have to be very sensitive to what's going on with people's lives," he added.
Some top fund-raisers said the notion of thumbing through call lists of friends to raise money for politics during an unprecedented economic and health crisis was tone-deaf. Others are simply focused elsewhere right now. They are investors who have seen their portfolios hammered, business owners trying to triage their holdings and take care of their employees, or even healthcare systems braced for the virus' full impact.
Still, a suite of Democratic super PACs are helping the Biden cause, with more than US$275 million in announced ads already.
Ms Michele Taylor, vice-chair of a pro-Biden super PAC, Unite the Country, said it was not proactively seeking out new donors now, as "people don't know what their economic future looks like".
But money is still flowing. "We're still having donors coming to us, our fund-raising continues to go well because people understand the urgency," she said. "We don't have to tell people we need a change of leadership."
NYTIMES
