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Michael Bloomberg and Joe Biden
CNN
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Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has donated about $20 million to President Joe Biden’s reelection bid, people familiar with the matter told CNN, a significant cash infusion at a time when Biden’s fundraising efforts have lagged behind rival Donald Trump.
Mr. Bloomberg, a former Republican and independent who ran against Mr. Biden in the 2020 Democratic primary, has donated $929,600, his biggest donation, to the Biden Victory Fund, a joint fundraising arm of the Biden campaign and the Democratic Party committees, campaign officials said. Mr. Bloomberg has also donated $19 million to FF PAC, also known as Future Forward, the main super PAC fighting Mr. Biden’s reelection campaign, according to a source familiar with the donations.
Future Forward, which has the endorsement of the president’s top aides, has set aside $250 million for TV and digital advertising in battleground states between the Democratic National Convention in August and Election Day.
The Washington Post first reported on Bloomberg’s donations after he spent heavily to support Biden in Florida during the 2020 election, a state Biden ultimately lost to Trump.
Meanwhile, Trump has also received significant fundraising help from billionaire banking heir Timothy Mellon, who emerged as one of the single largest donors in this year’s presidential election, injecting $50 million into a super PAC supporting his campaign in May.
The $50 million that Mellon donated last month to the Trump-aligned super PAC MAGA Inc. made up the majority of the $68.8 million the group reported raising in May, according to new filings. The donation, recorded the day after Trump was convicted in New York, will help fuel a $100 million advertising offensive the super PAC is planning for the summer.
Mellon has donated a total of $100 million to super PACs linked to presidential candidates, making him one of the richest funders in the 2024 presidential campaign. As of last month, the Wyoming-based investor had given $25 million each to a super PAC supporting Trump and another supporting the independent campaign of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is unlikely to win the election.
Mr. Bloomberg, a late entrant in the 2020 Democratic presidential race, has offered a more moderate vision for the country and cast himself as a problem solver. He is also the co-founder of privately held finance, software, data and media company Bloomberg LP.
Bloomberg, who spent hundreds of millions of dollars of his own money late into his presidential bid, endorsed Biden at the end of the campaign. The former New York City mayor said at the time that he entered the race “to beat Donald Trump” and was “leaving for the same reasons.”
Biden, who outspent Trump in funding for much of the 2024 campaign, has fallen behind his rival in fundraising over the past two months. On Thursday night, Biden and the Democratic Party announced they raised $85 million in May, well below the staggering $141 million that Trump and his political campaign said they raised last month. Trump’s fundraising was boosted significantly by tens of millions of dollars raised shortly after his criminal conviction in New York on May 30 for falsifying business records.
The Biden campaign said Thursday that his committees had a staggering $212 million in cash as of the start of June. The Trump campaign has not yet released all of its committees’ cash holdings. The campaigns aren’t required to do so until next month, but documents filed with the Federal Election Commission late Thursday painted a partial picture, showing that Trump’s main committees had more than $116.5 million in cash as of May 31, while the Biden campaign’s main account had $91.6 million in cash. That’s a reversal of fortunes from just a month ago, when Biden had a $35 million cash advantage.
CNN’s Fredreka Schouten, David Wright and Alex Rees-Matthews contributed to this report.
