Outside groups pledge over $1 billion to aid Biden's run
WASHINGTON >> A new $120 million pledge to lift President Joe Biden and his allies will push the total expected spending from outside groups working to reelect Biden to $1 billion this year.
The League of Conservation Voters, a leading climate organization that is among the biggest spenders on progressive causes, announced its plans for backing Biden on Tuesday, at a moment when his Republican challenger, former President Donald Trump, is struggling to raise funds. Biden’s campaign, independent of the outside groups, expects to raise and spend $2 billion as part of his reelection bid.
Republican groups are likely to spend big before November, as well, but it is difficult to make direct comparisons between the Democratic organizations and their Republican counterparts. Democratic and progressive organizations often announce their spending plans before they have raised the funds, which often come in from small donors. Republican groups that rely more on major donors tend not to telegraph their plans.
The pro-biden outside money originates from nearly a dozen organizations that include climate groups, labor unions and traditional super political action committees. There are left-wing groups like Moveon and moderate Republican groups like Republican Voters Against Trump.
The largest spenders so far are Future Forward, the super PAC blessed by the Biden campaign, which has reserved more than $250 million in television and digital advertising; the Service Employees International Union, which said last week that it would spend $200 million to back Biden and fellow Democrats; and American Bridge, the Democratic research organization that said in January that it planned to spend $140 million on an anti-trump advertising campaign in battleground states.
“The sheer scale of what we’re talking about has never been seen before in our country’s history,” said Tiffany Muller, the president of End Citizens United, the government reform advocacy group working to limit the ability of these types of outside groups to spend unlimited sums on elections.
On Wednesday, the League of Conservation Voters is scheduled to host its annual dinner in Washington. Those expected to attend include Vice President Kamala Harris; Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., the House minority leader; and a handful of other Democratic members of Congress.
Pete Maysmith, the league’s senior vice president for campaigns, said the group’s funding, which comes largely through its super PAC, would subsidize both an advertising campaign on television and digital platforms and also a field program that will encourage its members and supporters to tell their friends to vote for Biden.
“It’s hard to imagine higher stakes in these elections,” Maysmith said. “We will be communicating with voters in the battleground states and in the key races about the stakes, why President Biden has been such a champ on climate change and the obvious and extreme peril of having Donald Trump and his MAGA acolytes and big oil pleasers back in office for another four years.”
Stephanie Schriock, the former president of EMILY’S List, the group that supports and funds Democratic women running for office, said she expected the amount of outside money backing Biden to reach $2.5 billion to $3 billion, with large sums to be spent on legal issues and get-out-the-vote efforts this fall.
Major Democratic donors, Schriock said, have been animated in recent weeks as Trump neared and then clinched the Republican presidential nomination.
“Folks just did not want to believe that it was going to be Donald Trump again,” she said.
“The whole concept that this was happening again just sort of froze them and since Super Tuesday that has changed. People are like, ‘Oh, this is happening and this is real.’ ”