Democrats Enter 2020 Awash in Cash, and Brace for Long Primary Fight

A flood of money rushed into the presidential race in the last three months of 2019, producing an unusually large number of Democratic candidates with the resources to battle deep into the 2020 primary calendar, all vying for the right to face an incumbent president boasting his own enormous war chest.

The five strongest Democratic fundraisers are expected to report well more than $115 million raised in just the final quarter of the year, and they join two self-funding billionaires who are pouring their fortunes into expansive advertising campaigns.

Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont is pacing the Democratic field, announcing Thursday that he had raised $34.5 million in the past three months — the largest sum of any Democrat in any quarter in 2019. Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, collected $24.7 million, and former Vice President Joe Biden raised $22.7 million, his best showing of the year. Sen. Elizabeth Warren has not revealed her haul but told supporters in late December that she had banked $17 million, while setting a $20 million goal.

In a sign of how widespread the money windfall was, Andrew Yang, the former entrepreneur who was unknown nationally a year ago, raised a striking total of $16.5 million in the fourth quarter — more than Biden had managed in the third.

Whoever emerges from the fractious Democratic primary will face a financial powerhouse in President Donald Trump, who leveraged the impeachment fight of recent months to shatter his previous fundraising records, collecting $46 million in the fourth quarter, his campaign said Thursday. He enters 2020 with $102.7 million in cash on hand.

While Trump is stockpiling cash for the general election, Democrats are expected to spend tens of millions of dollars in the coming months taking aim at one another in an intensifying primary fight. And with an uncommonly high number of well-funded candidates, party leaders are bracing for an extended nomination battle, especially if the first four states to vote in February deliver a split verdict.

“Put your seat belts on, because I do expect we’re in for a protracted race to the finish line,” said Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York, a member of the House Democratic leadership.

The fact that so many candidates can simultaneously raise so much money is a testament to the rising power of small, online donors in presidential politics. Sanders and Warren combined to raise more than $160 million in 2019 while refusing to hold any traditional fundraisers with large contributors. And Biden credited his fundraising uptick to increased online support, which doubled over the previous three months.

Ami Copeland, who was deputy national finance director for Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign, said that the fourth-quarter numbers “really just lock in that top tier, period” and that the candidates’ substantial financial resources would “create some legs to this primary process.”

“This is going to go on for a while,” Copeland added.

Awaiting the top Democratic contenders in March is the billionaire former mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg. Though he is skipping the first four states, Bloomberg has already spent nearly $140 million of his fortune on television ads, according to the ad-tracking firm Advertising Analytics, mostly in the Super Tuesday states that will vote in early March and other states that will follow.

The scope of Bloomberg’s spending is staggering: He has reserved more in TV ads, $37 million, in the first days of January than the fundraising leader, Sanders, had collected in the final three months from more than 1.8 million contributions.

The high number of candidates with significant resources — billionaire Tom Steyer is filling the airwaves in the four early states with ads, as well — has stirred early worries that the party could go all the way to its July convention without a nominee, which would drastically truncate the window to focus on combating Trump.

“To have the best chance of beating Trump and moving on to the general, candidates will need to drop out when they still have plenty of money but no delegate path,” said David Plouffe, who managed Obama’s 2008 campaign and was a senior adviser in 2012. “It defies history they will do so, but it’s what will be required. This can’t be a cycle where just because you can keep going on, you do.” Jeffries said it was crucial for the party to coalesce around whoever emerges, whenever it happens.

“We cannot afford the degree of recklessness and political immaturity among some who conclude that unless my candidate wins, I’m taking my ball and going home,” he warned, in an apparent reference to Sanders’ disgruntled supporters in 2016. “That is what delivered Donald Trump the first time.”

For the second consecutive quarter, Brad Parscale, Trump’s campaign manager, declared the incumbent to be building a financial “juggernaut” for the general election. His $102.7 million war chest will be supplemented by tens of millions of dollars more in the coffers of the Republican National Committee, which Trump functionally controls.

Together, Trump’s reelection campaign and the Republican National Committee raised roughly $125 million in the third quarter, and a Trump campaign official said Thursday that their combined total for the fourth quarter would be even larger.

But Democrats were heartened that, collectively, their campaigns far surpassed the total of Trump’s reelection campaign; the full field of 14 candidates will more than double the president’s take, signaling the intense desire in the party to win back the White House.

“What you’re seeing is a Democratic base so aware and so paying attention so early on,” said Karine Jean-Pierre, a Democratic strategist and a spokeswoman for MoveOn.org, a progressive activist group. “It’s just been part of the reaction to Trump. The last three years we’ve seen a very engaged Democratic base.”

The full picture of the financial race will not become clear until Jan. 31, when all the candidates must file their fundraising reports with the Federal Election Commission. How much money the Democratic candidates actually have in the bank to spend in the closing stretch is an even more significant metric of their viability so close to votes being cast; notably, no Democrats have voluntarily disclosed that information.

Still, Sanders enters 2020 with a clear financial advantage over his primary rivals: His treasury allows him to buy additional television ads in the early states — he purchased new airtime in New Hampshire on Thursday — and to invest in staff in Super Tuesday states like California, where he had already dispatched 80 staff members as of December. Sanders’ strongest month of the year was December, when he raised more than $18 million from more than 900,000 contributions, and he particularly benefited from a rush of donations in the final two days of the year. He can also keep raising cash online without spending days off the trail doing fundraisers.

Biden had entered the fourth quarter with nearly $25 million less in cash on hand than Sanders. Biden’s campaign manager, Greg Schultz, wrote in a memo Thursday that the campaign would “always be playing from behind in the cash race” because Biden did not transfer funds to his presidential bid from other campaign accounts (as did two of his top rivals, Warren and Sanders).

Biden’s campaign said it had received a financial boost from Trump’s impeachment; the average amount of money it raised online per day, it said, more than doubled during the House’s impeachment inquiry compared with previous weeks. But despite his greater success online, Biden will continue to hold fundraisers into January, with events in the coming days in New York City, Philadelphia and Washington.

Buttigieg’s campaign outraised Biden for the third consecutive quarter, and it raised roughly $76 million in 2019, compared with about $60 million for Biden. What began as a bare-bones operation now counts more than 500 staff members nationwide, with 65 field offices in early voting states, according to a memo Wednesday from Buttigieg’s campaign manager, Mike Schmuhl.

Among the top-tier candidates, only Warren has not yet released her fundraising total. Her campaign emailed supporters in late December to say her pace was behind her third-quarter haul by millions of dollars and set a reduced goal of $20 million. On the trail in New Hampshire on Thursday, she brushed aside questions about her total, saying that unlike some rivals, she “didn’t spend one single minute selling access to my time to millionaires and billionaires.” Yang, who rang in the New Year with a Champagne toast in New Hampshire, was bullish on his $16.5 million haul, including more than $4 million in the last nine days of December from an online following known as the “Yang Gang.”

“We’re going to continue to surprise people,” Yang said in a high school gym in Concord, New Hampshire, on Thursday, “and shock the world when the voting starts in February.”