Major campaign donors and fundraisers act as a sort of shadow party in American politics, and on the Democratic side, they flexed their power like never before when it came to pressuring President Joe Biden to end his candidacy. Here, someone who describes themselves as “deeply involved in Democratic politics” recounts the roller coaster of the last month.

Take us back to early June to the weeks leading up to the debate. What was the predominant mood among major donors?
It was very much a wait-and-see period. I think people were worried. There was that George Clooney dinner in Los Angeles, where Obama kind of led the president off the stage. There were the incidents at the G7 summit. There were a bunch of issues reported in the press about the president’s acuity and physical condition. The sense among people that were meeting with him — in particular over the past year — was that he’d have good days and bad days: He was completely with it; he was a little out of it. Obviously, he was becoming physically more frail over time, but he certainly seemed to be with it.

So we were just waiting. We were just in the preparatory stage: beginning to organize groups of fellow donees, not putting dates on the calendar yet, but making sure that the network is in place. We realized that a lot of donors were focusing on the president’s performance at the debate, wondering which Joe Biden was going to show up in Atlanta that night in late June, whether he was up to the task of mounting a full-scale, continuous campaign against former President Trump.

Is that normal? What does June of an election year usually look like for you and other donors?
A lot of intense fundraising. Normally during this period you’d be raising hundreds of millions of dollars from your Democratic donor base and from grassroots efforts. The president would have been crisscrossing the country, but the president just really curtailed his schedule, and his internal advisers were really protecting him. It wasn’t good for fundraising. Usually you have the internal crew getting the candidate out and about and meeting with donors and traveling the country and pushing to raise as much money as possible before the push for the last three months. And that was not taking place here. Nothing was happening. We were waiting on the sidelines.

Were people trying to fundraise and it wasn’t working, or they weren’t trying?
Well, the Clooney-Obama event — that was a fundraiser. And in the spring, there was the event at Radio City with Clinton, Obama, and Biden. That was also a major fundraising event. But there weren’t a lot of the retail, smaller fundraising events where you’d raise $250,000 or a million dollars. They generally........

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