It has been two weeks since the debate and President Joe Biden’s campaign continues to suffer as donations seem to have slowed down to a halt, according to four sources close to the campaign who spoke to NBC News.
The fundraising is “already disastrous,” one source told NBC News. "The money has absolutely shut off," said another.
Major donors and Democratic power brokers worry that Biden’s adamant determination to stay in the race, along with his dismissal of polls and attacks on his doubters as "elites," makes him come across as “actually quite Trumpian," in the words of one past contributor to the campaign.
“It’s a broader, ‘Is the group around the president really in touch with what’s going on? Are people deluding themselves, and therefore whatever they’re conveying is sort of a reflection of the bubble?’” the donor told NBC News.
Moreover, the campaign’s problems are not just limited to the party’s big donors. Contributions from smaller donors have also seen a decline in recent days, a person with direct knowledge of internal campaign data told Politico. According to that source, grassroots fundraising is projected to drop about 20-25% this month.
“This is a massive, massive problem,” they told Politico. “Right now, we should be scaling up, doubling and tripling our goals as we head into the fall. But we’re cratering.”
Biden also continues to lose access to other, potential sources of money as angry donors refuse to reach out to their own networks, unwilling to put in such an effort for a candidate who may not actually be the Democratic nominee.
“You can’t reach out to someone, because someone could say, 'Geez, I didn’t know, he has dementia,’” a top bundler told NBC News. “Right now, it’s like someone asks, 'You want to go see a movie?’ And in this case I’m saying, ‘I don’t know what f---ing movie is playing.'"
