Bloomberg has given nearly $20 million to Biden reelection efforts

By CNN Newsource

Published June 21, 2024 6:31 AM

By Arlette Saenz and Shania Shelton, CNN

(CNN) — Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has donated nearly $20 million to efforts to reelect President Joe Biden, people familiar with the matter told CNN, a significant cash infusion at a time when the president’s fundraising operation is lagging behind that of his rival, Donald Trump.

Bloomberg, a former Republican-turned-independent who later faced off against Biden in the 2020 Democratic primary, gave the max donation of $929,600 to the Biden Victory Fund, the joint fundraising entity of the Biden campaign and Democratic Party Committees, a campaign official said. He has also donated $19 million to the FF PAC, the main super PAC working to promote Biden’s reelection bid that is also known as Future Forward, a source familiar with the donation said.

Future Forward, which is acting with the blessing of the president’s top aides, has reserved $250 million in television and digital advertising in battleground states between the Democratic Convention in August through Election Day.

The Washington Post was first to report on Bloomberg’s donations. In the 2020 campaign, Bloomberg heavily spent to support Biden in Florida, a state Biden ultimately lost to Trump.

Meanwhile, Trump also received a huge fundraising boost from a billionaire in May with a $50 million cash infusion to a super PAC backing his campaign from Timothy Mellon, an heir to a banking fortune who has emerged as one of the single largest donors in this year’s presidential election.

The $50 million donation from Mellon to the Trump-aligned MAGA Inc. super PAC last month accounted for the lion’s share of the $68.8 million that the group reported raising in May, new filings show. The donation, recorded a day after Trump’s conviction in New York, is helping to fuel the super PAC’s planned $100 million advertising blitz over the summer.

In all, Mellon has donated $100 million to super PACs associated with presidential candidates – making him one of the biggest financial figures of the 2024 campaign. Before last month, the Wyoming-based investor had donated $25 million apiece to the pro-Trump super PAC and to one supporting the long-shot independent campaign of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Bloomberg, who made a late entry into the 2020 Democratic race, offered a more moderate vision for the country and cast himself as a problem solver in his efforts. He is the co-founder of Bloomberg L.P., a privately-held financial, software, data, and media company.

When Bloomberg, who spent hundreds of millions of his own money to fund his late entry bid, ended his presidential campaign, he endorsed Biden. The former New York mayor said at the time that he got into the race “to defeat Donald Trump” and was “leaving for the same reason.”

Biden, who held a financial advantage over Trump for much of the 2024 campaign cycle, has seen his fundraising trail his rival for the past two months. On Thursday night, Biden and the Democratic Party announced that they raised $85 million in May, a figure that is well short of the staggering $141 million that Trump and his political operation said it collected last month. Trump’s fundraising was significantly boosted by tens of millions of dollars collected in the immediate aftermath of his May 30 conviction in a New York criminal case for falsifying business records.

Biden’s campaign said Thursday that his committees entered June with a massive $212 million cash stockpile. The Trump campaign has not yet disclosed cash-on-hand figures for all of its committees. Campaigns don’t have to do so until next month, but Federal Election Commission filings late Thursday offered a partial picture, showing Trump’s main committee with more than $116.5 million in cash reserves at May 31 while Biden’s main campaign account held $91.6 million — a stark reversal of fortune from just a month earlier, when Biden had a $35 million cash edge.

CNN’s Fredreka Schouten, David Wright and Alex Leeds Matthews contributed to this report.