Biden campaign raises $71.3 million, far outpacing Trump and Republican field

President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign announced Sunday it had raised a combined $71.3 million alongside the Democratic National Committee and a joint fundraising committee during the three-month period that ended in September, a haul that eclipses what his Republican rivals have amassed but falls short of where President Donald Trump was at this point four years ago.

The campaign said the three fundraising vehicles had a combined $90.5 million in cash on hand. It did not disclose how the cash was divided among the three fundraising vehicles.

“It was a spectacular quarter,” Jeffrey Katzenberg, the Hollywood mogul whom Biden named a co-chair of his campaign, said Saturday.

But Biden’s fundraising haul is well short of the $125 million Trump and the Republican National Committee raised during the same period of his 2020 reelection campaign. And it is just a touch more than the $70.1 million President Barack Obama and the DNC raised at this point in his 2012 campaign — at a time when individual contribution limits were far lower than they are today.

Katzenberg, in the interview, dismissed comparisons to such campaigns as “comparing apples to submarines.”

Comparisons with Obama’s fundraising efforts for the 2012 campaign are indeed imprecise, because a 2014 Supreme Court decision and other legal changes now allow candidates and parties to form joint fundraising committees that can accept single donations of nearly $1 million. In 2012, Obama and the DNC could collect only $30,500 per person.

More revealing details about the Biden campaign’s financial status will emerge when the committees file quarterly reports required by the Federal Election Commission. Those are due by the end of Sunday; a campaign official said the reports would become public late Sunday evening.

Among the most significant details in the campaign’s fundraising report will be the amount of cash it has accumulated from donors who gave less than $200.

These so-called small donors are vital to presidential efforts because they can be recruited to give again and again over the course of a long campaign. During the three-month fundraising period that ended in June, $10.2 million of contributions to the Biden effort, or about 21%, came from small donors, an amount smaller in percentage and in real dollars than the Trump and Obama campaigns in the comparable time periods.