In the last few weeks, large liberal donors announced one by one that they were withholding further money to President Joe Biden — and even some other Democratic candidates for office — until the president stepped aside from the race.
Now that he did so on Sunday, many of those donors are opening their pocketbooks again in support of the party’s presumptive nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris.
But, even though the money is flowing in again, one of the co-chairs of Biden’s campaign isn’t happy at all about how things went down.
Cedric Richmond, who was the co-chair of the campaign to get Biden re-elected, spoke with CNN following the president’s announcement on Sunday, saying wealthy donors “created a self-fulfilling prophecy” following the poor performance Biden had at the first presidential debate.
As Richmond said:
“You can’t win without money, and then they were going to point the finger at the candidate. They were going to blame it on Biden. For a president that has accomplished so much, it was a no-win situation.”
Now that Biden is no longer in the race, Richmond sent a direct message to these same donors, saying they “need to step the f*** up.”
Richmond backtracked a bit on those comments while speaking with CNN again for a follow-up interview on Thursday, saying he was angry at those “big donors” who were withholding funds.
Before the president announced that he was stepping aside, Lindy Li, one of the top fundraisers for the Democrats, said that it was becoming more challenging to reel in large donations for Biden’s support.
As she told Fox News then:
“Fundraising has — big money fundraising has slowed. People — major donors who have pledged massive amounts of checks, and I’m talking six, seven, seven-figure checks have suddenly disappeared, fallen off the face of the Earth, rescinded their pledges.”
During that interview, Li said a Biden withdrawal would ultimately be a “catastrophic mistake,” adding that if it were to happen, not choosing Harris as the alternative for the party would be “political malpractice.”
Of course, now we know that Biden did indeed step aside and Harris is, indeed, the presumptive nominee for the liberals. Not only did Biden immediately endorse Harris upon making his announcement, but the vice president also apparently has secured a sufficient number of delegates to capture the nomination.
In the first full day at the top of the presidential ticket, the new Harris campaign said they were able to bring in $100 million in donations. They also said that the total was from 1.1 million unique donors, and 62% of those donors were first-time contributors.
Harris’ campaign further said that amount was the “largest 24-hour raise in presidential history.”
In the first 24 hours following Donald Trump’s conviction in his New York City criminal trial, his campaign raised $53 million.
Now that Biden is no longer around in this campaign, it appears as though it’s going to be a rigorous back-and-forth for the next three months.
