President Biden's campaign has raised $155 million in cash for the 2024 election, far exceeding the total amount available to his Republican rival Donald Trump.
The president raised just $53 million last month, his strongest month for grassroots fundraising since the campaign launched, according to campaign officials. Among those efforts was a contest for supporters to attend a March 28 fundraiser in New York with Biden and former Presidents Obama and Clinton, which raised $4 million last month.
“The enthusiasm that we're getting as we go around the country is real,” Biden said in a radio interview with Wisconsin station WNOV 860 last week. “We have raised a lot of money. We have 1.5 million donors, including 500,000 new donors, who are small donors; 97% of donations are less than $200.”
Both Biden and Trump received their party nominations last week, setting up a rematch in 2024.
Trump's numbers for February were not published. By the end of January, his two main committees had only $36.6 million in cash, and combined they spent more than they took in that month. The main driver of these costs has been millions of dollars in legal fees from Trump's myriad lawsuits. These numbers are only a partial snapshot of Trump's operation's finances because other branches will not have to reveal their numbers until April.
The campaign said that the total amount of cash available to Biden is the highest raised by any Democratic candidate in history during this phase of the campaign. Emails to Biden supporters that focused on concerns about Trump helped boost support last month.
“While Joe Biden and the Democrats continue to put up historic grassroots fundraising numbers, Donald Trump and the Republican National Committee are in financial disarray,” said Jaime Harrison, leader of the Democratic National Committee. “Our grassroots supporters know that the stakes this year couldn’t be higher, and they are participating as if our democracy is at stake — because they are.”
Long writes for the Associated Press.
