Joe Biden raises $72m in second quarter for re-election bid

US president Joe Biden has raised $72 million (€64 million) in recent months to fund his bid for re-election next year, new figures reveal.

The president had a war chest of $77 million at the end of June, according to his campaign.

The amounts generated in fundraising in the weeks since Mr Biden announced he would be running again for the White House are considerably larger than those raised by his Republican political opponents.

The Biden campaign announced on Friday that it, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and a separate joint fundraising body had generated more than $72 million between April and the end of June.

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The three entities, between them, had $77 million on hand but it was not clear how this was divided.

Donald Trump, the frontrunner to secure the Republican Party nomination, said earlier this month that his campaign and joint fundraising committee had generated $35 million in the second quarter of the year.

Mr Trump’s closest rival for the Republican Party nomination, Florida governor Ron DeSantis, said he had raised about $20 million.

The campaign of Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and United Nations ambassador, raised $4.3 million in addition to a further $3 million generated by affiliated committees.

Another Republican Party candidate for the presidency, Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, said his campaign had raised $6.1 million.

Mr Biden in recent weeks has attended fundraising events in New York, California and Chicago.

Mr Biden’s campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez said the figures reflected the “incredible enthusiasm” for the president’s agenda and campaign.

The new figures show that 394,000 donors contributed to the Biden campaign, the DNC and the fundraising committee.

The campaign said the Biden-Harris team dramatically out-raised the announced totals from every Republican candidate running for president, “including Donald Trump by more than 2:1 and Ron DeSantis by more than 3:1″.

Ms Rodriguez said the Biden campaign’s strength was its grassroots supporters.

The average donation was $39 and 97 per cent of all donations were less than $200.

Divisive primary

The campaign said that 30 per cent of those who donated were new and had not contributed money towards his election bid in 2020.

In 2020, Biden’s campaign raised more than $1 billion.

“While republicans are burning through resources in a divisive primary focused on who can take the most extreme Maga (Make United States Great Again) positions, we are significantly out-raising every single one of them”, Ms Rodriguez said.

The Biden campaign has so far been a relatively lean operation. It has not yet announced a campaign headquarters and has hired relatively few election staff. Its fundraising performance, although strong, is not a record.

Former president Barack Obama raised $85.6 million during the April-to-June quarter in 2011 when he launched his campaign for a second term, though he announced he was running again for the White House three weeks earlier than Mr Biden did this year.

In 2019, then-President Donald Trump and the Republican national committee raised a combined $105 million in the second quarter.