Biden’s plan for Trump: Bury him with campaign cash

Joe Biden and his allies intend to bury Donald Trump in campaign cash, hoping that the president’s financial advantage will be the equalizer in a race that’s becoming more of an uphill climb for the president.

The results from Super Tuesday all but guaranteed a Biden-Trump rematch this November. It also marked another step toward a showdown that’s poised to be the most expensive and among the most vicious in modern political history.

An estimated $2.7 billion is expected to be spent just on presidential campaign advertising this cycle. Pro-Biden super PACs Future Forward and American Bridge already have committed to a blizzard of ads, with $250 million and $200 million in spending respectively, as Democrats prepare an onslaught of ads to turn voters’ attention away from Biden’s age and remind them of Trump’s chaotic first term. In a memo released Wednesday morning, the Biden campaign said that groups allied with it had committed to spending more than $700 million to help defeat Trump.

And with the president’s team eager to turn 2024 into a choice election for voters, plans are in place for the campaign itself to ramp up contrast ad-spending this spring. A person familiar with Biden’s campaign strategy but not authorized to speak about it publicly said it will come earlier than when then-President Barack Obama’s allies began turning up the heat on Republican rival Mitt Romney in 2012.

“Super Tuesday was always circled on our calendars because there’s a segment of persuadable voters who don’t believe that this was going to be a rematch,” said Bradley Beychok, co-founder of American Bridge, one of the pro-Biden super PACs. “This is going to be a ‘what’s behind door number two?’ election and door number two is a second Trump term, and that’s terrifying. Voters need to remember how chaotic the first Trump presidency was.”

“This,” he added, “is going to be a war until November.”

Biden enters the informal start of the general election trailing Trump in polling averages and with a sagging approval rating. But he does have money.

Biden and the Democratic National Committee have a $41 million cash advantage over Trump and the Republican National Committee, according to Federal Elections Commission filings. He has benefited from only nominal primary challengers, allowing him to rake in cash while Trump spent it, both on his campaign and his legal bills.

It’s the ultimate advantage of incumbency, being able to “plan ahead for the general” by “raising money, making early investments on the ground and online and nailing your contrast message and creative,” said Stephanie Cutter, a longtime Democratic consultant who has worked on multiple presidential campaigns.

“Those investments need to be made right now, so that advantage will start materializing in key ways,” she said. “We already see it in fundraising.”

The campaigns of former President George W. Bush in 2004 and Obama in 2012 are examples of huge fundraising hauls giving the incumbent an edge, serving as templates the Biden reelection campaign could follow. Obama’s reelection campaign, in particular, famously outlined a strategy to “kill” Romney in the summer of 2011. But it wasn’t until May of 2012 that the super PAC supporting Obama unloaded its television ad campaign offensive going after Romney’s career in private equity.

Biden, like Obama, is “sitting on good cash advantages, and frankly, approval ratings that aren’t great,” said Ami Copeland, who was Obama’s deputy national finance director in 2008. “There was time for them to define Romney through that cash, and there is time now to define Trump in the same way.”

Bill Burton, a founder of that Obama-era super PAC, Priorities USA, said Trump may be harder to bury in an avalanche of purely negative attacks than Romney precisely because the negatives associated with him are already baked into the voters’ psyche.

“We’re engaged in a presidential race where one of the candidates is embroiled in over 90 different crimes he’s accused of committing, and he’s still ahead in the polls,” Burton said. “I suspect that there’s only straight up negative ads you can hope to run effectively. More importantly, they have to express the choice between the two candidates.”

Biden and allied groups have already signaled plans to launch a sharply negative onslaught, focusing on Trump’s brags about the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the role he played in inciting the riots on Jan. 6. An early example came from a TV ad featuring Dr. Austin Dennard, a Texas woman who left her state to end a life-threatening pregnancy.

“At a routine ultrasound, I learned that the fetus would have a fatal condition and that there was absolutely no chance of survival,” she said in the Biden campaign ad, backed by a half-million dollar buy. “In Texas, you are forced to carry that pregnancy, and that is because of Donald Trump overturning Roe v. Wade.”

Framing 2024 as a choice also made clear in Biden’s comment following Super Tuesday, when Trump swept nearly all the contests: “Tonight’s results leave the American people with a clear choice: Are we going to keep moving forward or will we allow Donald Trump to drag us backwards into the chaos, division, and darkness that defined his term in office?”

But it’s hardly a certainty that a money advantage will materially matter in November. In 2020, Trump and the RNC sat on a $200 million cash edge over Biden, who emerged from a fierce and expensive Democratic presidential primary with nearly empty pockets that spring. That didn’t translate into a victory for Trump, nor does it guarantee Biden’s in 2024.

“Their cash advantage is real, and Republicans have their work cut out for them to play catch up,” said one national GOP strategist, granted anonymity to discuss the issue candidly. “But I fully expect that money will come for Trump and for Republicans down the stretch.”

The Trump campaign, for its part, is bullish. Trump campaign senior adviser Danielle Álvarez said in a statement that they “and RNC will have the resources necessary to wage an effective, aggressive, and successful campaign. No sum of money spent by the radical left and Crooked Joe Biden can fix the disastrous policies that are ruining America’s stature and middle class.”

To build up his coffers, Biden has been regularly crisscrossing the country for high-dollar fundraisers. One hotly anticipated event comes at the end of the month, when Biden, Obama and former President Bill Clinton will all appear together, forecast to raise more than $10 million in a single night, NBC News reported this week. On Tuesday night, the Biden campaign touted its grassroots fundraising operation, announcing they broke their own small-dollar donor single month record in February, but declined to share the total.

“I think there’s total clarity within the Democratic donor community and activists, grassroots, that we’re far better off in a second Biden term than a second Trump term,” said Wisconsin Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler. “Whatever other feelings folks might have, they’re ready to do whatever they can in their power to prevent a day-one dictatorship in Donald Trump.”

That money will not only go into paid ads, but will bolster an expanding staff operation, too. Dan Kanninen, Biden’s director of battleground states, said that over the next month, “you’ll see us going from a few dozen to hundreds of staff in battleground states, with a goal of getting into April with every battleground state in a position to scale appropriately and be competitive.”

“Building an infrastructure that can win a tight race with strong mobilization, a ground game, I think is a huge advantage in a close race, and we’re going to have that and they’re not,” Kannien said. “You can’t buy that down the field, you have to do it early.”

Jessica Piper contributed to this report.