Biden campaign goes on digital blitz after shaky debate

Joe Biden’s campaign started firing on all digital cylinders after Thursday’s grim debate performance.

His campaign sent nearly twice as many fundraising emails as typical, many of them focused on the debate and what former President Donald Trump said on stage. And Biden’s leading small-dollar fundraising operation spent 10 times as much on Facebook and Instagram ads the day after the debate compared to an average day over the past few months.

The digital blitz was an early public showing of how the incumbent president’s campaign sought to set the narrative after the debate through messaging aimed at many of his ardent supporters. That included highlighting Trump’s comments, as the former president remains a major fundraising foil for the Democratic grassroots.

But the onslaught also reflected the need to quell sudden insecurities about Biden’s performance, with one fundraising email acknowledging the debate “started rough” and arguing that other Democrats would do worse against Trump if they replaced Biden on the ticket.

By at least one metric, the flood of activity seemed to pay off: Biden’s campaign said on Tuesday it set fundraising records around the debate, raising $38 million Thursday through Sunday, including $30 million online. Nearly half the post-debate donors were first-time donors, the campaign said .

The surge in digital activity was in contrast with Trump’s campaign, which didn’t substantially increase its digital spending or number of fundraising emails after the debate.

A Biden campaign official said the surge in activity was largely pre-planned, as the campaign sought to leverage the debate as a high-profile moment. The timing also coincided with the end of June, a time when campaigns typically ratchet up digital fundraising around end-of-quarter deadlines. But much of the messaging was focused on the debate and its aftermath.

The messaging toward grassroots supporters mirrors how the Biden campaign has attempted to assuage large donors of his viability following last week’s debate flop. And it reflected an increased intensity: The campaign averaged 4 or 5 daily emails to supporters for most of May and then sent 8 or 9 per day in the days following the debate.

The first post-debate fundraising appeal, sent within an hour of the debate’s end, ran with the subject line “I’ve never heard so much malarkey in my whole life” — repeating a line Biden uttered in the debate in response to a Trump answer on the issue of foreign policy. On Friday, the campaign leaned into another Biden debate quote in a fundraising solicitation, with a message from the president saying he spent “90 minutes debating with a guy who has all the morals of an alley cat.”

On Saturday, the campaign addressed concerns about Biden’s performance more directly, with a lengthy fundraising message billed as “7 Things To Tell Your Friends After The Debate — And 4 Things You Can Do.” It was a notable reflection for a campaign that had initially sought to focus almost solely on Trump’s performance, and included the admission that the debate “started rough, but voters saw what a threat Donald Trump is to the country.”

Point six argued that replacing Biden at the top of the ticket would be “the best possible way for Donald Trump to win.” But the chart included in the message, based on a Data for Progress poll , showed little difference in how other Democrats would perform: nearly all the Democratic candidates, including Biden, had a 3-point gap with Trump.

Biden also substantially upped his spending across Facebook and Instagram after the debate, according to data from the platforms’ parent company, Meta. His joint fundraising committee — the main vehicle through which the campaign raises small dollar donations — alone spent more than $1.4 million on ads on Friday and another $784,000 on Saturday.

That massive spend went to running ads aiming to activate donors. One ad targeting users across the country said the debate “made it clear that Donald Trump poses an existential threat to our democracy.” Others leaned into more generic fundraising pitches, including touting the end-of-June deadline and the importance of recurring donations.

The Biden campaign also ran persuasion ads focused on a handful swing states, trying to capitalize on the president's better moments from the debate. One ad that began running on Facebook on Monday featured a clip of moderator Jake Tapper asking how the incumbent president would keep Social Security solvent, with Biden responding that he would “make the wealthy pay their fair share.”