2024 Elections

One adviser to major Democratic donors keeps a running list of reasons Biden could lose.

There have been few moments in Joe Biden’s term as president that haven’t been second-guessed. | Susan Walsh/AP

By Christopher Cadelago, Sally Goldenberg and Elena Schneider

05/28/2024 05:00 AM EDT

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A pervasive sense of fear has settled in at the highest levels of the Democratic Party over President Joe Biden’s reelection prospects, even among officeholders and strategists who had previously expressed confidence about the coming battle with Donald Trump.

All year, Democrats had been on a joyless and exhausting grind through the 2024 election. But now, nearly five months from the election, anxiety has morphed into palpable trepidation, according to more than a dozen party leaders and operatives. And the gap between what Democrats will say on TV or in print, and what they’ll text their friends, has only grown as worries have surged about Biden’s prospects.

“You don’t want to be that guy who is on the record saying we’re doomed, or the campaign’s bad or Biden’s making mistakes. Nobody wants to be that guy,” said a Democratic operative in close touch with the White House and granted anonymity to speak freely.

But Biden’s stubbornly poor polling and the stakes of the election “are creating the freakout,” he said.

“This isn’t, ‘Oh my God, Mitt Romney might become president.’ It’s ‘Oh my God, the democracy might end.’”

Despite everything, Trump is running ahead of Biden in most battleground states. He raised far more money in April, and the landscape may only become worse for Democrats, with Trump’s hush-money trial concluding and another — this one involving the president’s son — set to begin in Delaware.

The concern has metastasized in recent days as Trump jaunted to some of the country’s most liberal territories, including New Jersey and New York, to woo Hispanic and Black voters as he boasted, improbably, that he would win in those areas.

While he’s long lagged Biden in cash on hand, Trump’s fundraising outpaced the president’s by $25 million last month, and included a record-setting $50.5 million haul from an event in Palm Beach, Florida. One adviser to major Democratic Party donors provided a running list that has been shared with funders of nearly two dozen reasons why Biden could lose, ranging from immigration and high inflation to the president’s age, the unpopularity of Vice President Kamala Harris and the presence of third-party candidates like Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

“Donors ask me on an hourly basis about what I think,” the adviser said, calling it “so much easier to show them, so while they read it, I can pour a drink.”

The adviser added, “The list of why we ‘could’ win is so small I don’t even need to keep the list on my phone.”

Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey implored a room of high-dollar donors and local Democratic leaders to “think long and hard” about the stakes of the election. | Domenico Stinellis/AP

On the day after news broke that Biden had trailed Trump in fundraising last month, Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey raised the pressure on donors as she introduced the president to a crowd of 300.

The cluster of fundraising events Biden attended in Boston that day were........

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