I’m taking a sentence from a tweet that Anne Laurie embedded below, and highlighting the part that really bothers me:
The Bernie crowd wants to snow you into thinking the Biden surge is some K street conspiracy when in reality he has barely advertised because his campaign is so underresourced.
What a tragedy! Biden is “underresourced”. That makes it sound like being “underresourced” is similar to walking out your front door and having a bird shit on your head – something unfortunate over which you had no control.
Let me present a slightly different view: Biden’s campaign can’t raise money for shit. At the end of January, the last time campaigns reported, Biden had raised $68 mil. Warren: $91 mil. The Voldemort of the comments section: $132 mil. Maybe Biden had a huge February, and if he did I’ll eat humble pie, but I wasn’t once the King of Spain, so I doubt that will happen.
A further comment on those numbers: Biden was the frontrunner from the second he entered the race. He should be raking in the cash. Fucking Pete, a god damned nobody before he worked his ass off fundraising, raised $81 mil, and good for him. Warren and he-who-shall-not-be-named both are relying on individual donors, which means if Warren does well today (Dios mediante), she can expect a surge in donations, because all it takes for her to rake in some bucks is for the average Warren donor to decide to chip in the financial equivalent of one or two more Starbucks lattes. Both Warren and shh-don’t-say-it are using the same fundraising method that Barack Obama rode to victory in 2008, and it’s a very good way to raise money, especially for Democrats.
(This is not a moral argument, it is a pragmatic one. Democrats aren’t as rich as Republicans, but there are more of us. The solution is to find a way to make more people give much smaller individual donations, which Obama did.)
Let me ward off some usual objections on this:
- SuperPACs will swoop in and fix Biden’s campaign. Fuck to the no, compadres. SuperPACs are not supposed to coordinate with campaigns. Yeah, they do, but they still have their own agenda and campaigns need real dollars that they can control, especially to set up their ground game. Plus, if superPACs can contribute $1 billion to campaign ads, and your campaign can contribute $no billion, that’s worse than $1 billion and, say, $100 million, especially since your $100 million can be quickly targeted by your campaign without hinting to a SuperPAC.
- Some group or other will help organize the ground game. Na ganna happen. Those groups may help, but we need to have staffers on the ground from the presidential campaign to coordinate with them. And when it comes down to the nut cutting, as Dick Nixon would say, it’s better to have a lot of staffers you directly control.
- Biden’s fundraising will pick up now that he’s the front runner, and certainly in the general. ORLY? How? Biden’s circa-1996 campaign fundraising strategy seems to be to max out his donors, who can donate $2,800 in the primary, and $2,800 in the general. If nominated, the campaigns of Warren or the guy-who-has-the-same-last-name-as-the-founder-of-KFC, will probably get a lot of the $2,800 donors Biden would have gotten, along with their small dollar donors. If he’s nominated, Biden somehow needs to build all the machinery to get small donors to donate. It seems simple, but both of the small-dollar campaigns have been communicating with donors for years, and they have dialed in their electronic outreach to get the most happy meal equivalents from their donors.
- So does this make Bloomberg the best candidate? No, because money is a necessary but not sufficient condition to win an election, and all the money in the world isn’t going to re-animate Bloomberg’s corpse after his political career was murdered by Warren at the first debate in which he participated.
- Biden won in SC despite being “underresourced” so he can win anywhere despite that. Against money boy Trump, no fucking way.
If you are thinking of stanning for Biden because of some thought that he’s “electable”, whatever the fuck that means, consider that money is the only measurable component of the nebulous concept of “electability”. You gotta have cash to win. And Biden has very little of that, compared to the other candidates in the race.
