Dem
51
GOP
49
It's time for Q4 fundraising reports. And the Biden campaign decided to get a jump on its various rivals by crowing about the very successful 3 months it just had. Team Joe's take in Q4 was $97 million. Thanks to that money, the campaign says it has $117 million on hand, the most for any campaign ever at this point in the cycle.
What does this mean? Well, sometimes a big fundraising haul can speak to enthusiasm about a candidate or campaign. In this particular case, we are having a hard time reconciling that possibility with the myriad indications that voters are not enthused about Biden-Harris '24, and that many of those voters would like to see one or both of the ticket-mates swapped out. If we absolutely had to account for the big take, we would be more inclined to ascribe it to inflation and to the fact that the campaign has put on a full-court press on the fundraising front. It's gotta be 5-6 e-mails, and 1-2 text messages, every day.
That said, money is money, and the Biden campaign has a lot of it. Given that Donald Trump figures to be rerouting a lot of would-be campaign donations to his defense fund, we have to presume that Biden will have a sizable money lead throughout the campaign. And despite the constant carping from James Carville, David Axelrod and other veteran Democratic operatives, Biden and his team know a little something about how to run a campaign, and how to get maximum bang for the buck. We suspect big chunks of that war chest will go to voter registration, ground game and online campaigning. And hundreds of millions of dollars of spending on those things can certainly make a difference, particularly in an election that figures to be decided by fairly small margins in a handful of states. (Z)