Former Vice President Joe Biden may be pushing on to South Carolina and Nevada, but the big money donors bankrolling his presidential campaign are reportedly considering closing their checkbooks, according to the New York Post.
“Joe Biden’s disastrous results in Iowa and New Hampshire have spooked Democratic donors who are preparing to jump ship and throw their money behind someone else — even as his campaign vowed Wednesday that the best is yet to come,” the outlet reported Thursday. “New York heavyweight donors raising money for Biden are alarmed by the former vice president’s fifth-place finish in the New Hampshire primary and are privately wondering whether he can make it to Super Tuesday on March 3.”
Biden was never expected to win either Iowa or New Hampshire; Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) did well in both states in 2016 and was expected to duke it out with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), not Biden, for those delegates. But Biden was not supposed to finish fourth in either contest, putting him at a severe disadvantage going into Nevada, South Carolina, and the Super Tuesday states (where a full third of all Democratic National Convention delegates are up for grabs).
At this point, Biden is hanging on to a narrow, one-point lead in Nevada, and beating Sanders handily in South Carolina, but he’s losing to the Vermont socialist in nearly half of the Super Tuesday contests, leaving him struggling to justify why he remains in the race for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination — even to those donors who were once solidly behind the former Delaware Senator.
“There’s a great deal of concern,” a Biden bundler in New York told the Post. “It wasn’t expected that he would perform great in Iowa or New Hampshire. But we did not anticipate that he would fare this poorly. It was a significant decline.”
A major donor told CNBC on Wednesday that Biden still has time to prove himself, but it’s running out,“[e]ven if we stay active for the next two races after another big loss, I suspect the remaining air will leak out of the balloon before Super Tuesday.”
Biden tried to curb the disappointment in a speech on Wednesday in New Hampshire, but Politico reports that even his staff is getting scared that the campaign is now too far down the road toward failure.
“This is horrendous. We’re all scared,” a Biden adviser told the Washington, D.C. based outlet, per the NY Post. “I think we’re going to make it to South Carolina. I know we’re supposed to say we’re going to and we’re going to win. But I just don’t know.”
In addition to his losing record, Biden now faces the looming threat of former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg who has become a significant factor in the race for the Democratic nomination, thanks to his $300 million-plus ad buy. In a shock poll released last week, Bloomberg was even with Biden nationally, and that’s attracting the attention of Democratic donors: “Even before this setback, Biden has struggled to raise money this election cycle. It’s hard to see how he raises the money to propel him forward. I know a lot of people who are with Bloomberg.”