(Bloomberg) -- Wealthy Democratic donors have been thrust into the same battle their Republican counterparts waged and lost months ago — and are finding that when it comes to picking a president, their power has limits.
Some of the most powerful figures on Wall Street poured hundreds of millions of dollars into finding an alternative to Donald Trump and failed. Now, a group of deep-pocketed liberal donors have discovered that their dollars aren’t likely to be a deciding factor in whether President Joe Biden decides to bow out of the race.
After four years of Trump testing boundaries, Biden won over progressives and business-minded moderates in 2020 with a vow to restore dignity and normalcy to the office of the presidency. Yet after a disastrous June debate that raised questions about his health and acuity, many donors have been publicly and privately urging the 81-year-old president to yield to a younger candidate.
Some donors who have publicly urged Biden to leave the race were just weeks ago raising millions of dollars for his reelection, including actor George Clooney and Netflix Inc. co-founder Reed Hastings. Some have threatened to withhold money until the party selects a new nominee, prompting a precipitous drop in contributions since the debate two weeks ago, according to people familiar with the campaign’s fundraising.
Read More: Biden’s Biggest Donors Left Powerless to Sway Him to End Bid
On Thursday evening, Biden signaled his intention to remain atop the Democratic ticket, saying at a press conference in Washington that he intends to “finish this job” and win a second term.
While the drama over whether Biden should continue in the race isn’t over, the preferences of donors are likely to take a back seat to the guidance of Biden’s family and high-ranking elected Democrats, including Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.
“When they lead, everyone will follow, and the party’s focus will return to beating Trump,” said Josh Galper, a Democratic strategist.
Over a dozen conversations with donors and Democratic operatives indicated there are no centralized efforts underway to plan for a Biden alternative. Some donors are having conversations drawing on game theory, poker and psychology, but are up against the reality that Biden holds all the cards.
Republican Replay
Republican donors played a similar game during the GOP nominating process, only to find that their capacity to shape the race was finite.
Following their party’s poor showings in the 2022 midterm elections, major donors including Blackstone Inc.’s Steve Schwarzman, Continental Resources’s Harold Hamm, and Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus criticized Trump. For months, donors floated alternatives and pushed to field candidates who could give Republicans up and down the ballot a greater chance of victory.
But the donors never followed through in a systematic way. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis emerged as the strongest challenger to Trump a year before the primaries began, but some donors had concerns about how the relatively green politician would perform on the national stage.
After DeSantis’s campaign flamed out, it left an opening for Trump’s former United Nations ambassador, Nikki Haley, to attract wealthy donors. Jonathan Bush and other donors backed an effort to promote Haley to independent voters in New Hampshire.
“I was sort of shocked, honestly, that with only small numbers of millions of dollars, we pretty much added 40,000 votes to Nikki Haley,” Bush, a co-founder of a health technology company and a relative of two former presidents, said in an interview. Through Trump prevailed in the state, Bush said he’d do it again.
“I wished I’d done it earlier and I wished I’d done it deeper,” he said.
After Haley left the race, Republican donors gave in. Trump cemented his status as the frontrunner, and many of the wealthy people who had once sought his ouster started writing checks. Schwarzman, Hamm and Marcus have all publicly supported Trump since he became the presumed nominee in March.
Defying Millionaires
Biden’s situation now isn’t that dissimilar from what Trump, who turned 78 in June, had faced. Since he launched his campaign, donors have worried about the president’s lack of appeal among young voters, his stance on the Israel-Hamas war and his unwillingness to take questions at fundraisers.
The biggest difference between the efforts by some Republican donors to anoint a Trump alternative and the push by some Democratic contributors to convince Biden to bow out is that the former took place in the normal, orderly process for choosing a major party nominee for president, while the turmoil around Biden in the climactic stages of the race is without historical precedent.
As an incumbent president, it would have been unusual for Biden to face substantial opposition from longstanding Democratic benefactors. To be sure, financier Bill Ackman was willing to support a longshot Biden challenger, Representative Dean Phillips of Minnesota, but few others did. Phillips ended his campaign in March.
Biden has consistently broken monthly fundraising records for Democratic presidential candidates for much of his campaign. At times, he had roughly three times more cash on hand than Trump.
Biden spokesman Michael Tyler openly mocked the Republican’s money disadvantage, saying in a statement “if Donald Trump put up these kinds of numbers on The Apprentice, he’d fire himself.” That trend reversed itself in May when Trump out-raised Biden for the first time.
Eschewing pleas from wealthy donors is also likely to be politically helpful as Biden seeks to convince voters that he’s running to protect democracy.
Earlier this week, a defiant Biden told MSNBC he doesn’t “care what the millionaires think.” For now, that leaves wealthy Democratic contributors looking for a plan B in a bind.
“There are donors out there who would rather give money to any Democrat but Joe Biden,” said Robert Shapiro, a professor of government at Columbia University. “But the problem is at this point, Joe Biden is the nominee of the Democratic Party. And so they’re stuck.”
