Joe Biden faces a cash gap with Trump. He has to close it virtually

WASHINGTON (NYTIMES) - Mr Joe Biden is working the phones with top donors while cloistered in his Delaware home. His digital team is searching for the right tone to ask small contributors for cash during the sharpest economic downturn in their lifetimes. And his finance operation is plotting how to keep the cheques coming when catered parties for big contributors are on hold - indefinitely.

Top Biden fundraisers and donors, as well as campaign, super PAC and Democratic Party officials, described urgent efforts to reimagine the ways they raise money during a pandemic and global economic slowdown. And in nearly two dozen interviews, they expressed deepening concern that the downturn could choke off the flow of small online donations as millions of people lose their jobs.

The coronavirus shut down much of the American economy just as the former US vice-president took control of the Democratic presidential race, upending his plans to consolidate support among party donors who had previously supported other candidates and diminishing his ability to replenish his cash reserves to compete with President Donald Trump's well-funded reelection campaign.

Mr Trump and Mr Biden face the same headwinds. But the president began March with an enormous financial advantage over the Democrats: a combined roughly US$225 million (S$320 million) in cash on hand between his reelection campaign, the Republican National Committee and their shared committees.

Mr Biden and the Democratic National Committee had only US$20 million, after accounting for debts.

Mr Biden's campaign has not said how much money he has raised since mid-March, when the virus began taking its toll on the country, but multiple fundraisers said that giving was slowing and that they were reluctant to make aggressive requests for cash at this fragile moment, as the campaign itself readies for a 100 per cent virtual and digital operation.

These should be some of the busiest and headiest days for Mr Biden and his fundraising team in normal times, now that he has knocked out all of his rivals but Senator Bernie Sanders, who trails by a nearly insurmountable 300 delegates. But instead he has found himself holed up in Wilmington, Delaware, and limited so far to three video fundraisers from a makeshift studio installed in the retrofitted rec room of his house.

"It is definitely harder to raise money now," said Mr Mathew Littman, a former Biden speechwriter in California who is organising a video fundraiser and recently started a separate super PAC to raise money to support Mr Biden in Western states.

"The fun aspect of the fundraiser is taken out of it." "You have to be very sensitive to what's going on with people's lives," Mr Littman added. "This is definitely a much softer pitch than it was two weeks ago because the economy is going to be in either recession or a depression for a bit."

Some top fundraisers said the notion of thumbing through call lists of friends to raise money for politics during an unprecedented economic and health crisis was tone deaf. Others are simply focused elsewhere right now. They are investors who have seen their portfolios hammered, business owners trying to triage their holdings and take care of their employees, philanthropists with links to cultural institutions at risk of collapse, or even healthcare systems bracing for the virus's full impact.

"You don't fundraise now," Mr Ed Rendell, a Democratic former governor of Pennsylvania and a Biden supporter, said in an interview a week ago. "I haven't called anyone for money in the last 10 days and I don't intend to. Not while people are confined to their homes. I just don't think it's appropriate. Plus, people are worried about money."

While the Trump campaign begins with a big financial advantage, a suite of Democratic super PACs are helping the Biden cause, with more than US$275 million in announced ads already.

Ms Michele Taylor, vice-chair of a pro-Biden super PAC, Unite the Country, said the group was not proactively seeking out new donors right now given that "people don't know what their economic future looks like." But money is still flowing.

"We're still having donors coming to us, our fundraising continues to go well because people understand the urgency," she said of getting rid of Mr Trump. "We don't have to tell people we need a change of leadership."

Mr Terry McAuliffe, the former Virginia governor and Democratic National Committee chairman, began meeting with donors on behalf of Unite the Country before the coronavirus froze such activities earlier in March. But after the primary ends, Mr McAuliffe is expected to join the Biden campaign in some capacity, according to Democrats familiar with the planning.

The Biden campaign held one call in mid-March with an intimate group of some of the most prolific Democratic bundlers in the country, including Mr Jonathan Gray, the president and chief operating officer of the private equity firm Blackstone; Ms Jane Hartley, a former ambassador to France; Mr Blair Effron, a founder of the investment firm Centerview Partners; Mr Roger Altman, the founder of the investment firm Evercore; and Mr Mark Gallogly, the founder of another investment company, Centerbridge Partners, according to people familiar with the call.

From his home, Mr Biden has been making some calls personally, reaching out to those who initially supported other candidates while thanking early contributors and his most influential bundlers.

"In politics, we usually go back to the people who did the most," said Mr John Morgan, a Florida donor who hosted an event for Mr Biden last year and spoke recently with him.

One person close to the Biden campaign said preliminary discussions were underway for how to plan for a situation in which in-person fundraisers do not happen all the way through the general election in November, though that is not seen as the likeliest outcome.

More and more of the campaign's finance operation is going virtual. The Biden campaign also recently held a national finance committee call on which Ms Jennifer O'Malley Dillon, Mr Biden's new campaign manager, was introduced.

Money has been relatively scarce for Mr Biden throughout the 2020 race. Entering March, he was only the sixth biggest spender in the Democratic field, after running a relatively threadbare campaign during the primaries. All told, he has raised less than Mr Trump had in the bank at the start of March.

"The press kept saying, 'Biden has no money,'" Mr Biden said at the last debate, on March 15. "And they were right. Biden had no money."

But Mr Biden struck it big with online donors after a South Carolina victory that propelled him down the path toward the nomination. He said at the same debate that he had raised US$33 million in the first 15 days of March - far more than in any previous full month.

Then came the coronavirus, which has sapped overall online donations to Democrats on ActBlue, the party's main portal for online giving. The site processed an average of US$7.2 million per day of donations in the first half of March; that number has plunged to US$3.7 million on average since March 16.

Mr Biden does continue to spend heavily on Facebook fundraising ads - a sign that donors are still responding and giving, according to veteran digital operatives. Mr Biden has invested more than US$100,000 per day on Facebook since Super Tuesday, a level he had previously hit only in his first week as a candidate.

Mr Biden has not yet entered into a joint fundraising agreement with the DNC, which would allow him and the party to solicit far larger checks - for hundreds of thousands of dollars - compared with the current US$5,600 limit.

The absence of such an accord is one of the more concrete effects of Mr Sanders' decision to stay in the race, hindering Mr Biden's and the party's ability to close the fundraising gap with Mr Trump. Mr Biden almost certainly cannot formally clinch the nomination until June unless the Vermont senator exits sooner.

The DNC has said it would offer matching agreements in 2020 only to all "bona fide" candidates, after a backlash from the Sanders campaign to its 2016 agreement with Mrs Hillary Clinton.