Former Vice President Joe Biden has raised $21.5 million since entering the presidential race in late April, his campaign said Wednesday, The New York Times informed.
Biden’s haul for the second quarter of the year cements his status as one of the financial heavyweights among the two dozen Democratic presidential contenders. But it fell short of what Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind., collected in the quarter, which ran from April through June.
While Biden did not announce his candidacy until several weeks into the quarter, he also had the advantage of beginning his campaign as a household name who had spent eight years as vice president and decades as a senator.
Buttigieg, who at the start of the year was little known outside of Indiana, raised $24.8 million in the quarter, his campaign said this week. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who was also a candidate for the full quarter, collected $18 million, his campaign said, The Times added.
The presidential campaign of Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado also disclosed its fund-raising on Wednesday. It said Bennet had raised $2.8 million since he entered the race in early May, a total that underscores the steep financial challenge facing some of the lesser-known candidates in the large Democratic field.
Presidential candidates are due to report their second-quarter fund-raising to the Federal Election Commission by July 15. Fund-raising totals hardly assure success at the ballot box, for all his financial might, Buttigieg remains in single digits in national polling, but they can be an indicator of which candidates are gaining steam and which are struggling to attract interest. The forthcoming reports will also offer details on how campaigns are spending their money.
In the quarter, Biden received more than 436,000 donations from more than 256,000 donors, his campaign said. The average donation was $49, according to his team. His campaign did not say how much cash it had on hand at the end of the quarter.
Pete Buttigieg has announced the highest amount of money raised from donors among Democrats so far.
By comparison, Sanders’s campaign, which is not holding high-dollar fund-raisers, collected less money than Biden in the quarter, but received a much larger number of donations – nearly one million, according to the campaign. The Sanders campaign said its average donation in the quarter was $18.
In announcing its fund-raising total, the Biden campaign emphasized how much it had raised per day that Biden was in the race, a statistic that puts him above Buttigieg for the quarter. “We’ve raised more per day than any other presidential campaign,” Biden’s team wrote in an email to supporters, with the subject line “INCREDIBLE milestone.”
Be the first to comment