Biden campaign raised $1B+ in record-breaking fundraising haul
Joe Biden (Photo by ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty Images)
Electors in all 50 states will meet on Monday to formalize President-elect Joe Biden’s victory in last month’s election.
Contributing to Biden’s popular vote and Electoral College defeat of President Donald Trump: the more than $1 billion in record-breaking fundraising hauled in by the former vice president during his year-and-a-half-long campaign for the White House.
According to the president-elect’s most recent filing with the Federal Election Commission (FEC), which covered fundraising end expenditures from mid-October to late November, Biden hauled $1.06 billion during his presidential bid.
“President-elect Joe Biden’s campaign is the first in history to raise $1 billion from donors, adding yet another broken record to the 2020 cycle that set a new benchmark for political fundraising,” highlighted an analysis of the fundraising by the Center for Responsive Politics, a leading nonpartisan, independent and nonprofit research group tracking money in U.S. politics and its effect on elections and public policy.
The previous fundraising record was set by then-Sen. Barack Obama in his successful 2008 campaign for the White House.
According to the FEC filing, Biden spent $1.03 billion during his campaign, nearly all of the money he raised.
Biden, who declared his candidacy in April of last year, struggled to fundraise for the first half of his campaign. He raised just $8.9 million in January and $18 million in February of this year.
But Biden saw his fundraising spike starting in the late winter and early spring as he became the clear front-runner for the Democratic nomination and much of the party coalesced around his White House bid. Biden became the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee in April as his last remaining primary rival – Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont – dropped out of the race and backed the former vice president.
Former U.S. President Barack Obama and Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden wave to the crowd at the end of a drive-in campaign rally at Northwestern High School on October 31, 2020 in Flint, Michigan. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Biden and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) outraised President Trump and the Republican National Committee (RNC) in May and June and spent money at a much slower rate than the president's team during the spring and early summer.
Biden’s fundraising surged even further in August after he named Sen. Kamala Harris of California as his running mate. The infusion of cash allowed the Biden campaign to vastly outspend President Trump’s team to run TV ads starting at the beginning of August and lasting through Election Day on Nov. 3. The flooding of the airwaves in key battlegrounds arguably helped Biden narrowly edge the president in many of those states.
In August, Biden broke the all-time monthly fundraising record by the presidential candidate. He shattered his own record a month later, when he and the DNC hauled in a massive $432 billion in September.
“That’s more than I’ve ever raised in my whole life… I’m really humbled by it,” Biden said in a video he tweeted out after announcing the eye-popping campaign cash figures.
While outpaced by Biden, the president’s reelection campaign was also a money machine, raising well over $1 billion since starting to fundraise in January of 2017, when President Trump entered the White House. Approximately $800 million of that haul came during the 2020 cycle.
President Trump has refused to concede to Biden as he continues to claim there was massive voter fraud during the election.