How Joe Biden became the unlikeliest of online fundraising superstars

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 Biden’s online fundraising had slowed to such a trickle that his team basically had to shut down its digital advertising program. 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 Biden raised just $24,124.17 online in a day.

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

The unlikely transformation of 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 President Donald Trump.

In a little over a year, the former vice president’s online fundraising had increased 1,000-fold, to $24.1 million on Sept. 30.

Biden now has a once-unimaginable cash edge over Trump, and since Sept. 1 he has reserved about $140 million more in television advertising than the president. Money alone does not determine presidential winners — Hillary Clinton vastly outspent Trump in 2016 — but the cash has provided 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 Sen. Bernie Sanders in the primary. “I’m sure they never dreamed it would be this big.”

To chart Biden’s consequential financial turnabout, The New York Times analyzed the flow of nearly 11 million online contributions from the first nearly 500 days of his campaign. The analysis looked at $436 million given through August to 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 Biden’s fundraising metamorphosis, beginning with one unwittingly provided last fall by Trump, whose presidency has been rocket fuel for Democratic fundraising.

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The other three points — all linked in different ways to race — emerge from the 2020 data: 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 Sen. Kamala Harris as his running mate.

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

Biden’s committees raised a record-shattering $364.5 million in August, including $205 million online. Then he bested that total in September, officials said.

Teddy Goff, a top digital strategist for Clinton in 2016 and President 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 Biden’s financial trajectory came not long after he had scrapped his ad budget: the September 2019 news that Trump had pressured the president of Ukraine to investigate Biden’s son. That act eventually spurred the president’s impeachment. For many Democratic primary voters, it also was a blunt reminder of Biden’s polling strength against Trump.

In the 40 days before the call burst into view, on Sept. 20, 2019, Biden had raised about $62,500 online per day, on average; in the 40 days that followed, he averaged over $159,000.

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

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

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

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

Still, Biden mostly plodded along financially the rest of the pre-primary season. He averaged raising $169,059 per day online last October, $136,518 in November, $128,912 in December and $168,674 in January.

In other words, there was no growth.

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

South Carolina resurrected Biden

Then came South Carolina.

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

Biden would raise $25.3 million online over seven days — more than he had in the previous four months.

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

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.

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% of Biden’s April outlays — $4.7 million of $12 million — 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 clamored 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, Biden’s daily online haul had dipped below $775,000, 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 organizations — and also Biden’s coffers. On May 27, Biden raised $1.3 million, starting his first-ever two-week stretch of days above $1 million.

On June 2, 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 $3.2 million poured in — 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.

“Joe Biden showed up and he was the counter-president in that moment,” said Caitlin Mitchell, a former top DNC official who joined the Biden campaign as a senior digital strategist in May.

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The Biden campaign began furiously spending to capture the newfound energy, directing as much money into Facebook ads in the first days of June as it had in its first 10 months.

From March 1 to July 1, the campaign’s email list quintupled. The Floyd-inspired protests were a clear turning point, with 2.6 million added in June alone. Biden had averaged raising $795,000 per day in the preceding 75 days; that figured doubled to $1.65 million over the following 75 days.

Harris’ impact was astronomical

Biden’s choice for his running mate was a closely guarded secret by the campaign’s inner sanctum leading up to 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 Harris proved so popular, so quickly, that the campaign opened a new fulfillment center just for yard signs. More than $48 million flooded into the campaign in those heady first 48 hours, roughly 80% from online; by the end of the month, all 14 of Biden’s biggest days for online fundraising had come after forming the Biden-Harris ticket.

“This level is not inevitable,” said Whitney, the former Sanders strategist, who credited an investment in staff and digital infrastructure. “They have done very well to reach the maximum.”

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A Biden campaign that once had only five aides dedicated to online fundraising now counts 45, including those integrated with the DNC.

In one notable move, the Biden campaign sent news of 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 $8.1 million a day online in the last three weeks of August, after Harris’ selection and during the two national conventions. That is $2.5 million 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.”