Some major Democratic donors have told the largest pro-Biden super PAC, Future Forward, that pledges worth roughly $90 million are now on hold if President Biden remains atop the ticket, according to two people who have been briefed on the conversations.
The frozen contributions include multiple eight-figure commitments, according to the two people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity given the sensitivity of the situation. The decision to withhold such enormous sums of money is one of the most concrete examples of the fallout from Mr. Biden’s poor debate performance at the end of June.
Future Forward declined to comment on any conversations with donors or the amounts of any pledged money being withheld. A Future Forward adviser would say only that the group expected contributors who had paused donations to return once the current uncertainty about the ticket was resolved.
I hate that this is effective. We need money out of politics. But it’s probably nudging towards an accidentally correct decision in this case.
If money is speech, it becomes the only speech.
Agreed. These shouldn’t be the decision makers, but we all kind of know they are. If the donors were with him, they’d just keep moving along and then the regular people would eventually just have to accept their choice.
There was another article asking why regular Democrats weren’t marching in the streets, and apart from that being a kind of weird thing to expect for an intra-party decision, regular people also just don’t think they have that much influence on politicians. Like maybe if there were 100,000 people protesting, but there’s no way it would get that big, and 10,000 people marching wouldn’t have the impact of one Clooney.
We had the largest and longest protest movement in American history and the end result was that Biden called for MORE money to police. A bunch of kids camping on college campuses were turned into public enemy #1 because the politicians and the people who could call up newspaper editors thought they were a problem. Polling commonly show 70% of Democrats are in favor of positions that get little traction with their elected officials. We feel trapped by whatever they decide is the policy of the party, not like we’re actually driving it.
Its like I said previously, Biden doesn’t have a base. He doesn’t have a wide, grass-roots support network that provides him the kind of independence that Bernie or any Justice Democrats had.
Biden relies extremely heavily on big money donors. Clooney pulling his support so widely and loudly was a bell that simply can-not be un-rung. Clooney is a “bundler” in that he organizes other big money donors into things like Biden’s 40 million dollar dinner. That was all Clooney.
Simply put, Biden can’t win without 6 figure plus donations. This is a very very big deal. Where holes were being poked in the outside of this ship from the outside prior to the debate, things like this are the hull fracturing.
I agree. This is big, and this will cause another shift in the electoral calculus.
Biden said he would drop out if the Lord Almighty told him to.
Every corpodem’s god has spoken.
Lord SuperPac has spoken.