Joe Biden’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee formally agreed to a joint fundraising agreement on Friday, two Democratic officials tell CNN, clearing the way for the presumptive nominee to raise larger amounts from individuals with the committee as he moves toward the general election.
The agreement will give Biden and his top advisers more sway over the Party’s fundraising activities and comes at the same time the DNC will install Mary Beth Cahill, who is currently a senior adviser at the committee, as their new CEO. Cahill was the Biden campaign’s pick for the job.
The agreement allows donors to now contribute a maximum of $360,600 to the Biden Victory Fund, a party official said, a dramatic increase that many Democrats hope will boost the campaign’s fundraising, which lags behind President Donald Trump’s and the Republican Party’s.
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“Our goal is to ensure that we put Joe Biden in the best position possible to beat Donald Trump, and this joint fundraising agreement allows us to do just that,” said Cahill, a longtime Democratic official who knows Biden well and ran then-Sen. John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign. “Americans are hungry for new leadership in the White House and are uniting around our nominee.”
This sort of move by the presumptive nominee happens every presidential election and allows the presidential campaign to exert far more control over the party’s business as the general election begins. The agreement between Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign and the DNC caused controversy at the time as those Democrats supporting Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders accused the former secretary of state of putting undue pressure on the Party before she was the nominee.
Cahill is taking over for Seema Nanda, who has held the job for two years.
“Seema spent two years building an organization that has left the DNC in the strongest position it has been in before a Presidential election in recent history,” said DNC Chair Tom Perez. “Mary Beth will bring her decades of experience and strategy to ensure that Joe Biden becomes the President of the United States and Democrats win at every level.”
Democrats have trailed far behind Republicans in fundraising in recent years and Biden and the DNC begin the general election at a financial disadvantage.
The Republican National Committee and Trump campaign began April with nearly $250 million in the bank, while Biden and the DNC had nearly $57 million in their campaign coffers.
Trump and the RNC have a similar joint fundraising agreement, called Trump Victory. But their agreement includes 22 state parties, bringing the maximum contribution to $580,600 per person. A DNC official said their agreement is an initial one between the campaign and the committee, but a partnership with the state parties could be evaluated in the future.
Biden has had a number of key fundraising moments this month, even as events have been forced to be hosted on video due to the coronavirus.
Billy Porter, the celebrity emcee of a Biden fundraiser on Thursday night, said the event raised $1.1 million, according to a pool report.
And in response to a donor’s question earlier this month about the unity of the Democratic Party, Biden said his campaign has raised more than $5 million in two days, attributing the money raised to former candidates who have endorsed him reaching out on his behalf.
“We’ve raised more money online because of these folks than we ever have,” Biden told the donors. “We’re raising, we raised I think it was $2.75 million yesterday. Two and a half million dollars a day before. We’re raising more money than we ever raised because they’re going out to their people and saying, ‘it’s time to give your five bucks, it’s time to help.’”
Biden, after becoming the presumptive nominee, shook up his campaign in preparation for the general election.
Biden hired Jen O’Malley Dillon, a longtime Democratic operative, as his new campaign manager in March, replacing Greg Schultz, who remained on the campaign as a general election strategies to spearhead work with the DNC and other Democratic committees.
Schultz has longtime ties to Biden, joining his White House staff as a senior adviser in 2013 after having served as the Ohio director for President Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign. He also served as the executive director of Biden’s American Possibilities PAC before his presidential campaign was launched.
