Why Biden Raising More Money Than Trump for the 2024 Election Matters

Why Biden Raising More Money Than Trump for the 2024 Election Matters

President Biden may be down in the polls, but he’s way up on Donald Trump when it comes to campaign funds.

Each quarter since the president announced he was running again, Biden has lapped his predecessor in cash. The Biden campaign and its political committees held $192 million at the end of March, more than double the $93 million that Trump, the Republican National Committee and their shared accounts reported. Biden will also benefit from more than $1 billion pledged by independent groups that back his re-election. Trump allies have so far announced only a pittance of the outside money Biden has accrued.

Biden supporters.

What can a campaign do with this sort of advantage? In today’s newsletter, I’ll explain how a deluge of cash might matter — and why it might not.

At the White House.

What campaigns do

There are two main things a political campaign buys: advertising and efforts to get out the vote.

TV and digital ads are by far the biggest expenditures for a national campaign, with staff-heavy field operations the next biggest. The Biden campaign plans to raise $2 billion by November. On screens and airwaves, it will hammer its anti-Trump message in battleground states. While that’s happening, it will send campaign workers to find voters in those states, figure out which ones need prodding to return their ballots or drag others to their local precinct.

Campaigns spend their money on these things because they often work. “You win this election going out and talking to voters,” Jeffrey Katzenberg, the Hollywood mogul who is a co-chair of the Biden campaign, told me. “That’s what our financial advantage allows us to do.” One example is abortion policy: The Biden campaign is spending millions to remind voters about Trump’s role in the overturning of Roe v. Wade.

Jacob Zuma, South Africa’s former president.

It’s worth remembering that presidential campaign ads are not like commercials for insurance. They are aimed at people who don’t follow politics closely and may not have strong opinions about Biden and Trump. That’s a relatively small population, but it’s large enough to decide any of the eight battleground states.

The less well-known the candidate, the larger the impact of political advertising. In 2012, Barack Obama’s campaign began defining Mitt Romney as out-of-touch while he was still fighting his primary contest — helping to doom him in the general election.

On the organizing side, Team Biden — a network that includes the Democratic National Committee and state Democratic parties — has opened more than 100 offices in battleground states, employing some 300 people. Most of these offices existed as state party facilities and now operate as joint ventures with the campaign. Another 200 people work at the Biden campaign’s headquarters in Wilmington, Del. (The campaign declined to make any of its top officials available to comment on its spending for this story.)

Taro Akebono in Japan in 1998.

The Trump campaign has aired almost no paid advertising since February, according to AdImpact, a media tracking firm. It has not announced any new campaign offices.

Is this cycle different?

The question is what difference it makes to have a financial advantage in a presidential campaign. In 2016, Hillary Clinton had three times as many field offices as Trump did. I wrote a story from Ohio that September about how Trump campaign offices in the state sat vacant while Clinton’s were buzzing. Yet Trump won Ohio by eight percentage points.

Presidential candidates are already so familiar to voters that advertising may mean less than in other races. That’s especially true here. Both Biden and Trump are universally known and not very well liked by the American public. Polling shows Trump’s supporters are loyal, while Biden’s biggest challenge is stitching back together the coalition of voters who backed him in 2020. Many of those constituencies — Black and Latino men, young people, some voters focused on the economy or Gaza — are reluctant to do so again. In response, the Biden campaign is using its money on ads to scare some of those people by arguing Trump would be far worse.

But most people already have firm opinions about Trump. As Beth Myers, a senior aide to the Romney campaign, said, “Carpet-bombing with negative ads — what Obama did to us in spring 2012 when we were low on cash — probably won’t be as effective for Biden.”

Biden has spent $15 million on ads since the beginning of March, according to AdImpact. His approval rating hasn’t moved.

It’s possible that the advertising will be more effective in coming months, when more Americans will focus on the campaign. But Howard Wolfson, a former aide to Hillary Clinton and a longtime aide to Michael Bloomberg, is among those who worries that it is too late and that voters’ opinions are already fixed.

The Biden campaign has seven months to show whether its money can buy, if not love, at least enough enmity for Trump to earn the president a second term in the White House.

THE LATEST NEWS

Economy

■ Annual inflation rose to 3.5 percent, higher than economists expected. The increase complicates Biden’s campaign claims about the economy.

■ Rising inflation could also prevent the Fed from cutting interest rates anytime soon.

Japanese State Visit

■ Biden and Japan’s prime minister, Fumio Kishida, announced more military and economic collaboration to counter China.

■ Kishida also promised to give Washington 250 cherry trees. They will replace 140 that are being uprooted to make way for taller sea walls around the Jefferson Memorial.

■ Jill Biden wore an Oscar de la Renta gown to the state dinner. Its subtle symbolism was a preview of her role in the presidential campaign, Vanessa Friedman writes.

■ The dinner guests included Hillary Clinton and Jeff Bezos. See the full list.

More on Politics

■ Trump’s former finance chief was sentenced to five months in Rikers for lying to the New York attorney general’s office.

■ Right-wing House Republicans refused to extend a surveillance law after Trump publicly denounced it.

■ Iowa made it a crime for a person to enter the state if they have ever been deported or denied entry into the U.S.

Israel-Hamas War

■ An Israeli airstrike killed three sons of Ismail Haniyeh, the political leader of Hamas. Israel said they were military operatives.

■ Hamas said it did not have 40 living hostages in Gaza who met the criteria for the first step of an exchange deal. The claim raised concerns that more hostages are dead than previously thought.

More International News

■ Jacob Zuma, South Africa’s ex-president who resigned in scandal, is running again after a court cleared him to appear on a ballot.

■ Ukraine passed a mobilization law to replenish its forces. It had already lowered the draft age to 25, unsettling many young men and their families.

■ A failed drug-sniffing dog in Taiwan — rejected for being too friendly — is now helping to locate earthquake victims.

■ Spring floods forced more than 100,000 people to leave their homes in Russia and Kazakhstan.

Other Big Stories

■ The ocean has set heat records every day for the past year. Scientists are puzzled by the intensity, even considering climate change.

■ Monday’s solar eclipse drew huge crowds — and traffic — to the path of totality. See where viewing was busiest.

■ Rats breed faster than New York City can kill them. A council member wants to try spreading contraceptive pellets.

Opinions

Poverty kills: Patients struggle to keep wounds clean, or their medications get stolen. Permanent housing can help, Lindsay Ryan writes.

A rematch election between an ex-president and an incumbent, framed as a do-or-die test of democracy: 2024, meet 1892, Jon Grinspan writes.

There is a limit to Pope Francis’ progressivism. His condemnation of abortion and transgender identity shows that, Ross Douthat writes.

MORNING READS

Blood, latex and floorboards: For some fragrance makers, it’s more important to smell surprising than good.

Alien dinosaurs? She hunts for life in space by studying Earth.

Robot bankers: A.I. can replace much of Wall Street’s entry-level work. What will happen to the finance bros?

Affairs: “What Sleeping With Married Men Taught Me About Infidelity” is one of Modern Love’s most contentious essays. Hear Esther Perel read and discuss it.

Reverse heist: A German museum fired an employee for hanging his own work in its modern art collection.

Social Q’s: “Was it racist to take family photos at a wedding without me and my wife?”

Lives Lived: Trina Robbins was a creator and historian of comics — a pioneering woman in a male-dominated field. She died at 84.

SPORTS

Sumo: Taro Akebono, a Hawaii-born wrestler who became sumo’s first foreign grand champion, died at 54.

Golf: The Masters starts today, with Scottie Scheffler the favorite.

Baseball: Shohei Ohtani’s former interpreter is said to be negotiating a guilty plea in a gambling scandal.

N.F.L.: The Packers and Eagles will meet in September in the league’s first game in Brazil, a Friday opener streamed exclusively on Peacock.

Indiana Fever: The franchise set to pick Iowa’s Caitlin Clark in Monday’s W.N.B.A Draft will play 36 of its 40 games on national TV this year, more than any other team.

ARTS AND IDEAS

Leonardo da Vinci’s “Vitruvian Man” — one of his most famous drawings — has been reproduced on cheap notebooks, coffee mugs, T-shirts, aprons and even puzzles. It’s become so lucrative that it’s the subject of a legal battle.

The Italian government and a German puzzle maker are battling over a 1,000-piece puzzle, raising questions about who has the right to profit from old works.

More on culture

■ Enthusiastic collectors, including Barbra Streisand and Donna Karan, have contributed to a surging interest in the work of the Art Deco-era painter Tamara de Lempicka.

■ Nickelodeon will reboot “Dora the Explorer,” this time with more Spanish — and a podcast.

■ Late night hosts raged against Arizona’s abortion ruling.

THE MORNING RECOMMENDS …

Take this reader-favorite chickpea salad to work with you.

Quiet your inner critic.

Save on dry cleaning with this hand-washing detergent.

Make coffee in a Nespresso machine.

GAMES

Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was noblewomen.

And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku, Connections and Strands.

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