Top Biden Officials Seek to Calm Donors: ‘Breathe Through the Nose’

President Biden’s top campaign brass on Monday tried to tamp down the panic that had captured his financial base in the campaign’s most formal outreach yet to its wealthiest supporters after last week’s damaging debate.

In a Zoom audio call on Monday with about 500 members of the campaign’s National Finance Committee and some other contributors, some of the Biden campaign’s most senior officials, including the chair Jen O’Malley Dillon, the deputy campaign manager Quentin Fulks and the pollster Molly Murphy, presided for an hour.

“Everyone just needs to breathe through the nose for minute,” Chris Korge, the finance chair of the Democratic National Committee, said toward the end of the call. The New York Times was connected to the call by an authorized participant.

The senior Biden officials downplayed the political fallout of the debate, held on Thursday in Atlanta, but provided precious little new information to the members of the National Finance Committee. Those financiers have been locked in a ceaseless, rolling conversation with their own networks on conference calls and Signal threads since Thursday night about whether their investment in the Biden campaign has been the right decision.

The remarks Monday did little to stem the anxiety of the campaign’s well-heeled patrons, according to people on the call who described it while it was still ongoing. Rufus Gifford, a finance chair for Mr. Biden, did say that fund-raising numbers in June would be “extremely strong.”

The Biden campaign took no live questions from donors; instead, contributors submitted queries through the Zoom messaging app, but other attendees could not read them, according to people on the call. The campaign then chose among the presubmitted inquiries. The campaign manager, Julie Chavez Rodriguez, did not join the call.