Biden’s Cash Advantage

President Biden may be down in the polls, but he’s way up on Donald Trump when it comes to campaign funds.

Each quarter since the president announced he was running again, Biden has lapped his predecessor in cash. The Biden campaign and its political committees held $192 million at the end of March, more than double the $93 million that Trump, the Republican National Committee and their shared accounts reported. Biden will also benefit from more than $1 billion pledged by independent groups that back his re-election. Trump allies have so far announced only a pittance of the outside money Biden has accrued.

What can a campaign do with this sort of advantage? In today’s newsletter, I’ll explain how a deluge of cash might matter — and why it might not.

What campaigns do

There are two main things a political campaign buys: advertising and efforts to get out the vote.

TV and digital ads are by far the biggest expenditures for a national campaign, with staff-heavy field operations the next biggest. The Biden campaign plans to raise $2 billion by November. On screens and airwaves, it will hammer its anti-Trump message in battleground states. While that’s happening, it will send campaign workers to find voters in those states, figure out which ones need prodding to return their ballots or drag others to their local precinct.

Campaigns spend their money on these things because they often work. “You win this election going out and talking to voters,” Jeffrey Katzenberg, the Hollywood mogul who is a co-chair of the Biden campaign, told me. “That’s what our financial advantage allows us to do.” One example is abortion policy: The Biden campaign is spending millions to remind voters about Trump’s role in the overturning of Roe v. Wade.

It’s worth remembering that presidential campaign ads are not like commercials for insurance. They are aimed at people who don’t follow politics closely and may not have strong opinions about Biden and Trump. That’s a relatively small population, but it’s large enough to decide any of the eight battleground states.