Major Warning Sign Emerges for Biden as 2024 Campaign Heats Up: 'Whistling Past the Graveyard'
Warning signs for President Joe Biden’s campaign are emerging in what one commentator said is a lack of enthusiasm for small donors to invest in Biden’s re-election.
Small-donor giving to ActBlue, the major Democratic online fundraising platform, is at $312 million for federal races, about $30 million below where it was in the 2020 election cycle, according to Politico.
ActBlue also had a 32 percent drop in small donors in the second quarter of the year.
“Because small donors are a proxy for enthusiasm, if people aren’t concerned about the drop-off in contributions, then they just aren’t paying attention or whistling past the graveyard,” said Ari Rabin-Havt, the deputy campaign manager for the 2020 presidential campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont.
“The impact is from top to bottom. You can see it in the ActBlue number, you can see it from the DNC down through every group. There has to be a quick examination among Democrats about what is creating this enthusiasm gap,” Rabin-Havt said.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee are both seeing drops of roughly one-third in the amount from small donors coming in. Some progressive groups have laid off staff due to the lack of cash, Politico noted.
Enthusiasm was in short supply in a New York Times/Siena College poll.
The poll said 20 percent of Democrats would be enthusiastic to have Biden as the party’s nominee, while 51 percent said they were satisfied but not enthusiastic.
About 30 percent of those who plan to vote for Biden said they had been hoping for another Democrat to be the party’s choice.
The New York Times/Siena College poll of 1,329 registered voters nationwide was conducted between July 23 and July 27. The margin error is plus or minus 3.67 percentage points.
In interviews, the New York Times found some voters resigned more than enthusiastic.
“It’s basically like I don’t have another choice, because I don’t feel comfortable not voting,” Mamiya Langham, 38, a government analyst from Atlanta, said.
She said she had issues with Biden’s tax policy.
“We’re kind of smushed in the middle, and we’re taking on the brunt of the taxes for everybody,” she said.
Others worried about Biden’s apparent condition.
“Some of his glitches on TV, what they catch on TV, just has me worried about the president,” Daryl Coleman, 52, of Cleveland, Alabama, said.
Reuters reported that 42 percent of Biden’s 2020 voters who participated in a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll said the economy was “worse” now than in 2020.
The online nationwide poll of 2,009 U.S. adults had what Reuters called “a credibility interval of about three percentage points.”
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