Elections

The New York Times Audio app is home to journalism and storytelling, and provides news, depth and serendipity. If you haven’t already, download it here — available to Times news subscribers on iOS — and sign up for our weekly newsletter.The Headlines brings you the biggest stories of the day from the Times journalists who are covering them, all in about 10 minutes. Hosted by Annie Correal, the new morning show features three top stories from reporters across the newsroom and around the world, so you always have a sense of what’s happening, even if you only have a few minutes to spare.Last month, the Supreme Court ruled that Alabama’s current map violated the Voting Rights Act. Now, the state must redraw it.Mickey Welsh/The Montgomery Advertiser, via Associated PressOn Today’s Episode:Alabama Scrambles to Redraw Its Voting Map After a Supreme Court Surprise, with Emily CochraneThe Gilgo Beach Serial Killings: What We KnowHow a Vast Demographic Shift Will Reshape the World, with Lauren LeatherbyTo Ease Global Warming, the Whitest of Paints, with Cara BuckleyEli Cohen More

A new study also found that judges appointed by the former president were more likely to vote for claims of religious freedom — unless they came from Muslims.When Donald J. Trump was running for president in 2016, he vowed to appoint Supreme Court justices who would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade. Three justices and six years later, he made good on that promise.Mr. Trump also made a more general pledge during that campaign, about religion. At a Republican debate, a moderator asked whether he would “commit to voters tonight that religious liberty will be an absolute litmus test for anyone you appoint, not just to the Supreme Court, but to all courts.”Mr. Trump said he would, and a new study has found that he largely delivered on that assurance, too. Mr. Trump’s appointees to the lower federal courts, the study found, voted in favor of claims of religious liberty more often than not only Democratic appointees and but also judges named by other Republican presidents.There was an exception: Muslim plaintiffs fared worse before Trump appointees than before other judges.“There seems to be a very big difference on how these cases come out, depending on the specific religion in question,” said Stephen J. Choi, a law professor at New York University, who conducted the study with Mitu Gulati of the University of Virginia and Eric A. Posner of the University of Chicago.Another part of the study explored what was distinctive about Mr. Trump’s appointees to the lower courts, considering 807 judges named by seven presidents as of late 2020.The study found, for instance, that judges named by Mr. Trump had “stronger or more numerous religious affiliations” with churches and other houses of worship, with religious schools, and with groups like Alliance Defending Freedom and First Liberty, which have won a series of major Supreme Court cases for conservative Christians.Trump appointees were also much more likely to be members of the Federalist Society, the conservative legal group, than other Republican appointees: 56 percent versus 22 percent.For appeals court nominations in the Trump administration, the study found that membership in the group was “virtually required,” with a rate of more than 88 percent, compared with 44 percent for other Republican appointees.Mr. Trump made another pledge at another 2016 debate about the judges he would appoint. “They’ll respect the Second Amendment and what it stands for, what it represents,” he said.The new study did not try to measure how Mr. Trump’s appointees voted in gun rights cases. But it did find that more than 9 percent of Trump appointees were members of the National Rifle Association, compared with less than 2 percent of other Republican appointees and less than 1 percent of Democratic appointees.“In light of the polarizing nature of gun rights and the N.R.A.’s association with extreme views on gun ownership,” the study’s authors wrote, “jurists who seek a reputation for impartiality would normally want to avoid membership in the N.R.A.”The study did document how Mr. Trump’s appointees voted in cases on claims of religious liberty, examining some 1,600 votes in more than 500 cases in the federal appeals courts from 2000 to 2022.Trump appointees voted in favor of plaintiffs claiming that their right to free exercise of religion had been violated about 45 percent of the time, compared with 36 percent for other Republican appointees and 33 percent of Democratic appointees. The gap grew for cases that involved only Christians, to more than 56 percent, compared with 42 percent for other Republican appointees and 29 percent for Democratic ones.And the numbers flipped when it came to Muslims, with Trump appointees at 19 percent, compared with 34 percent for other Republican appointees and 48 percent for Democratic ones.“The pattern that emerges,” the study said, “is consistent with conventional wisdom: Democrats tend to protect minority religions, and Republicans tend to protect Christianity (and possibly Judaism).”The study considered a common critique of Trump appointees: that they are less qualified than other judges. It found that the evidence did not support the charge, at least on average and at least as measured by the prestige of the law schools the judges attended, whether they had served as law clerks and ratings from the American Bar Association.“We find little evidence that Trump judges break the historical pattern of judicial appointments,” the study’s authors wrote. “Women and minorities are less well represented among Trump judges than among Democratic judges, but that reflects a historical partisan difference; Trump judges do not differ much from Republican judges in this respect.”“A few more Trump judges received top A.B.A. ratings, but not quite as many Trump judges attended top-10 law schools,” the study said. “Our view is that the data do not support the view that Trump’s judges were less qualified than judges appointed by other presidents.”But the study’s main finding, on religion, was that Mr. Trump was true to his word.“Trump is not known to be personally religious,” the study’s authors wrote, “but he appears to have believed that he could obtain votes by promising to appoint religious judges, and he kept his promise.” More

A day after former President Donald J. Trump headlined the Turning Point conference in Florida, two of his Republican opponents were booed and heckled at the same event.Not long ago, the names on the marquee would have been right at home on Fox News: Stephen K. Bannon, Tucker Carlson and Roger J. Stone Jr.But Fox News ousted Mr. Carlson three months ago, and Mr. Bannon, Mr. Stone and a boisterous pro-Trump crowd at the Turning Point Action Conference were eager to take shots at the conservative network, arguing that it has not been sufficiently supportive of former President Donald J. Trump as he seeks to regain the office he lost in 2020.At the two-day gathering, with thousands of pro-Trump activists in attendance this weekend in South Florida, jeers flew on Sunday at the mention of Rupert Murdoch, the Fox media mogul, as well as Speaker Kevin McCarthy.Donald J. Trump spoke to roughly 6,000 attendees for more than an hour and a half on Sunday.Saul Martinez for The New York TimesAnd after Mr. Trump spoke to this crowd on Saturday, any of his Republican rivals for the party’s 2024 presidential nomination took the stage at their own peril.In a speech on Sunday, Mr. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s onetime chief strategist who was found guilty of contempt of Congress, suggested that Mr. Murdoch had been using Fox News to hype Republican governors from battleground states to undermine Mr. Trump’s candidacy. He cited Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, Mr. Trump’s main rival in the party, who trails him by roughly 30 percentage points in national polls, as a cautionary tale.“Come on down,” Mr. Bannon said. “Bring it because we’ll destroy you just like we destroyed DeSantis.”Mr. Bannon — the host of a right-wing podcast, which he has used to promote election falsehoods and conspiracy theories — criticized Fox News for its lack of coverage of the pro-Trump conclave and called Mr. Trump’s political battles a “jihad.”“Donald Trump is our instrument for retribution,” he said.While Fox News did not carry the event on its main network, it did show conference speeches by Mr. Trump and the other Republican candidates on Fox Nation, its subscription streaming service. A Fox Corporation spokesman declined to comment on behalf of Mr. Murdoch.Two of Mr. Trump’s long-shot Republican opponents — Asa Hutchinson, the former Arkansas governor; and Francis X. Suarez, the mayor of Miami — experienced the wrath of Mr. Trump’s supporters firsthand on Sunday when they were heckled and booed.When Mr. Suarez, whom The Miami Herald has reported as being under F.B.I. investigation in a corruption case, stepped up to the microphone, a few people in the crowd yelled “traitor.”He responded by mentioning his Cuban American heritage and saying that dissenting voices were welcome in America, unlike in his ancestors’ home country.A woman yelling at Francis X. Suarez, the Miami mayor and Republican presidential candidate.Saul Martinez for The New York Times“It’s OK to have a little bit of hate,” Mr. Suarez told the crowd.Saul Martinez for The New York Times“It’s OK to have a little bit of hate,” Mr. Suarez said. Later, he asked conservative activists to chip in to his campaign.Mr. Hutchinson paused his remarks as the crowd began chanting Mr. Trump’s name, and one of his biggest applause lines came when he mentioned his successor in the Arkansas governor’s office: Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Mr. Trump’s onetime White House press secretary.Contending with cross-talk for much of his speech, Mr. Hutchinson said that Republicans needed to have respect for people with different opinions.At the conference, attendees could attach sticky notes to cutouts of the Republican candidates’ heads.A man placed one with a homophobic slur on the face of Mike Pence, Mr. Trump’s former vice president. Later, it appeared to have been removed. But a number of stickers branding Mr. Pence a “traitor” for refusing to overturn the 2020 election on Jan. 6, 2021, covered his face.On a cutout of Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and Mr. Trump’s United Nation’s ambassador, one sticky note said: “Woman in Politics? Cringe.”At the event’s apex on Saturday, about 6,000 people filled the Palm Beach County Convention Center to hear Mr. Trump speak for nearly 100 minutes. Mr. Carlson ruminated about his dismissal from Fox News in April.Roger J. Stone Jr. speaking to the pro-Trump crowd.Saul Martinez for The New York TimesIn a speech on Sunday, Mr. Stone, who had a felony conviction pardoned by Mr. Trump, claimed that federal prosecutors had offered him a deal to dredge up dirt implicating Mr. Trump in wrongdoing and recalled a predawn F.B.I. raid at his home in South Florida in 2019 during which he was arrested.“I said, ‘You can go to hell,’” he said. More

The 2024 election map is a challenging one for Democrats — especially in states they need to hold for a majority. But the incumbents made a strong financial showing this quarter.Senate Democrats staring down tough re-election fights can look to one bright spot: sizable fund-raising hauls and cash stockpiles more than a year before Election Day.In states where they are most vulnerable in 2024 — Montana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Wisconsin — Democratic incumbents have raised more money than they previously have at this stage in earlier cycles, the latest campaign filings show. Saturday was the deadline for campaigns to file spending and fund-raising reports for the three months between April 1 and June 30.Most of the vulnerable incumbent Democratic senators also topped their prospective Republican challengers in fund-raising and will head into the fall with several million dollars in cash on hand.The race for Senate control is in its earliest months, and Republicans are still building campaigns. Yet the Democrats’ relative financial strength in the second quarter of an off year suggests significant energy as the party aims to protect its slim majority next year.The electoral map, however, will be one of the most challenging the party has faced in years. Nearly two dozen Democratic seats are up for re-election in 2024, with eight incumbents seen as vulnerable, while just 10 Republicans face re-election — and all of the G.O.P. incumbents won by comfortable margins in previous cycles.In their Senate re-election bids, Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Jon Tester of Montana both brought in more than $5 million. Mr. Brown had $8.7 million in cash on hand, and Mr. Tester $10.5 million. Senator Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin raised $3.2 million, the most ever raised in a Wisconsin Senate contest in an off year, according to her campaign.Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, a conservative Democrat who has not yet publicly said whether he will run for re-election — and is flirting with a third-party presidential run — raised $1.3 million over the last three months and has more than $10 million in the bank, expanding his cash advantage over Gov. Jim Justice and Representative Alex Mooney, Republicans who have already begun campaigns to unseat him.In Pennsylvania, Senator Bob Casey posted his best fund-raising quarter to date, bringing in more than $4 million for his re-election bid.Republicans have been preparing their own money machines and recruiting candidates in five states with vulnerable Democrats. Republican confidence has also been bolstered by the 2024 Senate map.The Democrats “are trying to use money to defy gravity,” said Stu Sandler, a political consultant and former political director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. “This is a lopsided map for them,” he added, pointing to former President Donald J. Trump’s 2020 victories in Ohio, Montana and West Virginia — all states Mr. Trump won decisively. And, he said, Republicans have some “very credible favorites” to challenge the incumbents.Democrats view this fund-raising as a crucial show of strength that will fortify their candidates ahead of a difficult 2024 cycle for the party.“Voters and grass-roots supporters are once again supporting battle-tested Senate Democratic candidates in record ways because they recognize the stakes of this election and the importance of stopping Republicans from implementing their toxic agenda,” said Tommy Garcia, spokesman for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.In Arizona, Representative Ruben Gallego raised more than Senator Kyrsten Sinema, who has changed her party affiliation from Democrat to independent, by two-to-one — the second time this year Mr. Gallego has notched such a ratio. He still trails Ms. Sinema in cash on hand by more than $7 million. Ms. Sinema has not yet announced whether she will run for re-election.Even Democrats in safe Republican territory had strong showings. In Texas, Representative Colin Allred raised $6.2 million in his challenge to Senator Ted Cruz. Mr. Allred, who announced his campaign in May, brought in more money in a shorter period of time than Mr. Cruz, who raised $4.4 million in the last three months. More

The long-shot candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination has a history of embracing conspiracy theories. His latest comments claimed the virus spared certain ethnic and religious groups.A conspiracy-filled rant by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that the Covid-19 virus was engineered to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people has stirred accusations of antisemitism and racism in the Democratic candidate’s long-shot run for president.“Covid-19. There is an argument that it is ethnically targeted. Covid-19 attacks certain races disproportionately,” Mr. Kennedy said at a private gathering in New York that was captured on videotape by The New York Post. “Covid-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.”Mr. Kennedy has made his political career on false conspiracy theories about not just Covid-19 and Covid vaccines but disproved links between common childhood vaccines and autism, mass surveillance and 5G cellular phone technology, ill health effects from Wi-Fi and a “stolen” election in 2004 that gave the presidency back to George W. Bush.But his suggestion that the coronavirus pandemic spared Chinese people and Jews of European descent strayed into new and bigoted territory.Asian Americans suffered through a brutal spate of assaults at the beginning of the Covid pandemic by people who blamed the Chinese for intentionally releasing the virus on the world. And Mr. Kennedy’s remarks about Ashkenazi Jews hit antisemitic tropes on multiple levels.Ashkenazi Jews generally descend from those who settled in Eastern Europe after the Roman Empire destroyed the Jewish state around 70 A.D. Sephardic Jews went to the Middle East, North Africa and Spain.The idea that Ashkenazi Jews are somehow separate from Caucasians has fueled deadly bigotry for centuries, and the conspiracy of Jewish immunity from tragedy has been part of antisemitic attacks as far back as the Black Plague and as recently as the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.Abraham Foxman, who worked for decades as the head of the Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish civil rights organization, condemned “antisemitic stereotypes going back to the Middle Ages that claimed Jews protected themselves from diseases.”“It cannot be ignorance because he is not ignorant, so he must believe it,” Mr. Foxman said Saturday night.Mr. Kennedy responded to The New York Post story with a defense that only deepened his conspiratorial theories. He wrote on Twitter that he “accurately pointed out” that the United States is “developing ethnically targeted bioweapons” — a point he made in his remarks captured on video, when he repeated Russian propaganda that the United States is collecting D.N.A. in Ukraine to target Russians with tailored bioweapons.Mr. Kennedy also linked to a scientific paper that he said showed the structure of the Covid-19 virus made Black and Caucasian people more susceptible, and “ethnic Chinese, Finns and Ashkenazi Jews” were less receptive.But the study he linked to, published in July 2020, early in the pandemic and before effective treatments had emerged, made no reference to Chinese people as more receptive to the virus, nor did it speak of targeting the virus. It said one particular receptor for the virus appeared not to be present in Amish and Ashkenazi Jews.His conclusions were roundly dismissed by scientists.“Jewish or Chinese protease consensus sequences are not a thing in biochemistry, but they are in racism and antisemitism,” said Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan.Mr. Kennedy returned to Twitter just after midnight on Sunday to call charges of antisemitism against him “a disgusting fabrication.”“I understand the emotional pain that these inaccurate distortions and fabrications have caused to many Jews who recall the blood libels of poison wells and the deliberate spread of disease as the pretext for genocidal programs against their ancestors,” he wrote in a lengthy post. “My father and my uncles, John F. Kennedy and Senator Edward Kennedy, devoted enormous political energies during their careers to supporting Israel and fighting antisemitism. I intend to spend my political career making those family causes my priority.”Mr. Kennedy’s comments are not the first time he has strayed into the intersection of Judaism and Covid. In his zeal for condemning steps to stem the spread of the virus, he spoke last year at an anti-vaccination mandate rally in Washington, saying, “Even in Hitler’s Germany, you could cross the Alps into Switzerland. You could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did,” suggesting Covid restrictions were worse.Even his wife, the actress Cheryl Hines, condemned the comment about Anne Frank.“My husband’s reference to Anne Frank at a mandate rally in D.C. was reprehensible and insensitive,” she wrote on Twitter.The anger from Jewish leaders over his Covid remarks was immediate.The Anti-Defamation League wrote, “The claim that Covid-19 was a bioweapon created by the Chinese or Jews to attack Caucasians and Black people is deeply offensive and feeds into sinophobic and antisemitic conspiracy theories about Covid-19 that we have seen evolve over the last three years.”Representative Josh Gottheimer, Democrat of New Jersey, wrote on Twitter, “RFK Jr. is a disgrace to the Kennedy name and the Democratic Party. For the record, my whole family, who is Jewish, got Covid.” More

State lawmakers have until Friday to come up with new congressional districts that do not illegally dilute the power of Black voters.Under orders from the Supreme Court to produce a voting map that no longer illegally dilutes the power of Black voters in Alabama, the state’s lawmakers are now facing a high-stakes scramble to come up with an acceptable replacement by the end of this week.A little over a month after the court’s surprise ruling, the Alabama legislature will convene for a special five-day session on Monday, with the Republican supermajority having given little public indication of how it plans to fulfill a mandate to craft a second district that allows Black voters to elect a representative of their choice — one who could well be a Democrat.The effects of the revised map, which must be passed by Friday and approved by a federal court, could reverberate across the country, with other states in the South confronting similar voting rights challenges and Republicans looking to hold onto a razor-thin majority in the U.S. House of Representatives next year.The session also comes at a pivotal moment in the debate over the constitutionality of factoring race into government decisions, as conservatives have increasingly chipped away at the 1965 Voting Rights Act and other longstanding judicial protections centered on equality and race.“The eyes of the nation are looking at you,” Evan Milligan, one of several Alabama residents who had challenged the legality of the map, told lawmakers during a committee hearing in Montgomery on Thursday. “If you can cut out the noise, look within — you can look to history, you can make a mark in history that will set a standard for this country.”Alabama has a long list of bitter disputes over the enforcement of the Voting Rights Act, a landmark law born out of the civil rights movement whose key provisions were gutted by a 2013 Supreme Court decision. Litigation forced the creation of Alabama’s first majority-Black congressional district in 1992, and the seat has been represented by a Black Democrat ever since then.But the current fight stems from lawsuits filed to oppose the map drawn after the 2020 census. In a state where 27 percent of the population is Black, the Republican-controlled legislature packed nearly a third of the Black population into that one district. The state’s remaining six districts each elected a white Republican.There is little disagreement that voting in Alabama is highly polarized, but lawyers for the state legislature attributed the situation to politics rather than race. (The Supreme Court ruled in 2019 that a gerrymander that discriminates against one party’s voters is a political problem, not a legal one.)Evan Milligan, an Alabama resident who sued over the state’s voting map, speaking with reporters outside the Supreme Court in Washington last year.Patrick Semansky/Associated Press“Black Alabamians’ ‘candidates of choice’ tend to lose elections in Alabama not because they are Black or because they receive Black support, but because they are Democrats,” the state’s lawyers wrote.And with about 80 percent of Black voters in Alabama identifying as Democrats or leaning toward Democratic candidates, according to the Pew Research Center, “that just makes them easy prey in terms of redistricting,” said Seth C. McKee, a University of Oklahoma professor who has written about political realignment in the South. “And once Republicans get control, it’s just difficult for them not to dominate.”But a federal panel of three judges unanimously said the map had most likely violated the Voting Rights Act and ordered it redrawn, four months before the 2022 primary elections. The Supreme Court, while agreeing to consider the challenge, allowed the map to go into effect ahead of the November elections.Many experts expected the Supreme Court to say in the Alabama case what it essentially said in its decision outlawing affirmative action in education: Making allowances to remedy discrimination against one group inevitably ends up discriminating against other groups.However, in June, the court narrowly upheld Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the principal remaining clause of the law, which outlaws any election law or rule that discriminates based on race, color or language. That decision has already had ramifications elsewhere: a similar lawsuit is now moving forward in Louisiana, while voting rights advocates in Georgia have begun sparring with the state over whether the ruling affects similar lawsuits there.“We’re already showing how this opinion is going to have ripple effects,” said Abha Khanna, who represented some of the Alabama plaintiffs as the head of the Elias Law Group’s redistricting practice. She added, “You are sending a message to states and jurisdictions.”The Alabama legislature now has until Friday to create another map that gains approval from a federal court, and has solicited public proposals. Should the legislature fall short, the map could again be challenged, leaving open the possibility that the court would draw its own map and cut out the legislature altogether.“It is critical that Alabama be fairly and accurately represented in Washington,” said Gov. Kay Ivey, a Republican, as she formally summoned the legislature back for the special session. “Our legislature knows our state better than the federal courts do.”But it leaves Republicans with a task that could jeopardize the electoral security of one of their own in Congress. The nonpartisan Cook Political Report now marks the once solidly Republican First and Second Congressional Districts as toss-ups, citing “the presumption that one of their seats will ultimately become a Montgomery and Mobile-based Black majority seat that comfortably elects a Democrat.”On Thursday, multiple Black Republicans spoke during the committee hearing, including Belinda Thomas, a Dale County councilwoman and Republican Party official who later described herself as “living proof” that the current map made it possible for Black candidates to succeed. Some residents and officials also raised concerns about diminishing the representation of rural communities and economic opportunity under some of the proposed maps.State Senator Rodger Smitherman comparing congressional maps during a special session on redistricting at the Alabama Statehouse in Montgomery in 2021.Mickey Welsh/The Montgomery Advertiser, via Associated PressDemocrats appeared divided over which plan to back, with some lawmakers supporting one that relies on a combination of traditionally Democratic voting blocs to create a new district in order to avoid drawing on racial lines. At least one of the plaintiffs wore a T-shirt emblazoned with their preferred map, which would enshrine the 18 counties of Alabama’s Black Belt, the stretch of historically rich soil that fueled cotton plantations worked by slave labor, into two districts with at least 50 percent of the Black voting population.“I want myself and my community to have a seat at the table, rather than be on the menu,” said Shalela Dowdy, a Mobile resident and one of the plaintiffs.But notably absent from the public discussion on Thursday was any plan backed by the Republican supermajority. State Representative Chris Pringle, a Republican from Mobile, said that a final map would be shared before a committee meeting on Monday, although Democrats balked at being left out of the process and at the public getting little time to review a final plan.“This is a really tortured process,” said State Representative Chris England, a Democrat from Tuscaloosa. He added that “everybody else has been presenting the maps that they believe best represent the state of Alabama, give everybody an opportunity to be represented, but the supermajority has not.”Mr. Pringle said that the committee tasked with overseeing the creation of the new map had been overwhelmed with a number of submissions, including from as far away as France and New Zealand. A little over a dozen had been made public online or in a hearing, with Mr. England sharing a few more maps circulated among the committee on Twitter on Friday evening.“We have been pretty much overwhelmed,” Mr. Pringle said.Adam Liptak More

Wealthy Democrats have thrown their money behind the president’s re-election bid, but for many reasons, the party’s small donors have yet to step up their contributions.When President Biden traveled to San Francisco last month, he raised more than $10 million in 36 hours from wealthy Democrats. Trips to Chicago and New York netted millions more, as did fund-raising events around Washington, proving that the party’s big-donor class is fully committed to Mr. Biden’s re-election campaign.But the small-dollar online money spigot that helped Mr. Biden smash fund-raising records during his 2020 presidential campaign has not yet turned on, and there are ample signs that it may be months before it does.The Biden campaign and the Biden Victory Fund, its joint fund-raising vehicle, collected $10.2 million from small donors — defined as those who gave $200 or less — during the three-month fund-raising period that ended June 30, according to a Federal Election Commission report filed Saturday. That figure is about half of the $21 million President Barack Obama’s campaign raised during the same period of his 2012 re-election effort.Democrats involved with Mr. Biden’s campaign and the world of online fund-raising detailed a host of reasons for Mr. Biden’s relatively low small-dollar haul.Google and Apple have made it harder for email senders to see data about who has opened solicitations. Inflation slowed political donations across the board. Donors are exhausted by the unending flow of emails asking for money, and recipients are responding to far fewer of them.At the moment, Democrats aren’t quite as fired up as they were in 2018 and 2020, when Donald J. Trump’s presidency opened floodgates of liberal money, or ahead of the 2022 midterms, when the Capitol riot, the rise of the election-denial movement and the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade all motivated donors.And Mr. Biden is not an insurgent candidate who is motivating students to put up posters of him on dorm-room walls, as Mr. Obama or Senator Bernie Sanders did in their campaigns. His low-key White House and bare-bones campaign haven’t yet motivated supporters to rage-donate to his campaign.“Right now there’s there is no day-to-day competition combat going on,” said Jeffrey Katzenberg, the Hollywood mogul, whom Mr. Biden named a co-chairman of his campaign. “So these are the most loyal, most dedicated believers and supporters. It’ll build over time.”Mr. Biden’s campaign highlighted an array of statistics to promote its grass-roots donor operation. Nearly a third of its 394,000 donors did not contribute to Mr. Biden in 2020, the campaign said.Yet the president’s finance reports show that he is far more dependent on the wealthiest donors than Mr. Trump was in his re-election bid or Mr. Biden’s opponents were in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary contest.Ten donors, including Mr. Katzenberg, Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn, and Stewart W. Bainum Jr., the Maryland hotel magnate, gave $500,000 or more to the Biden Victory Fund. Another 82 donors contributed $100,000 or more.Four years ago, 35 percent of the money raised by Mr. Trump and the two joint committees his campaign formed with the national committee — Trump Victory and Trump Make America Great Again Committee — came from donors who gave $200 or less. For Mr. Biden, 21 percent of funds to his campaign and the joint finance committee came from small donors.Small-dollar contributions are down across the political spectrum. An analysis conducted by Middle Seat, a digital fund-raising firm with an array of Democratic clients, found that small donors had given less money during the first fund-raising period of 2023 than they had in nearly four years — since early 2019.“If I were on the Biden team right now, I’d be really happy with the numbers,” said Kenneth Pennington, a partner at Middle Seat. “It’s a terrible fund-raising environment, and he’s not launching a new campaign.”While Mr. Biden’s total fund-raising was roughly on par with the Republican candidates, he outpaced them with small donors. Combined, the G.O.P. candidates raised $7.5 million from small donors to his $10.2 million.The percentage of contributions of less than $200 is typically at its high point at the beginning of a campaign and drops as campaigns proceed, because when the amount an individual donor has given exceeds $200, it triggers a federal disclosure requirement.When Mr. Biden began his 2020 campaign for president, 38 percent of the money his campaign raised during the comparable reporting period came from small donors. Democratic online fund-raising experts said they expected the pace of online giving to the Biden campaign to pick up early next year, once voters begin to pay more attention to the Republican primary race and the nominee to oppose Mr. Biden emerges.“Once Democratic donors become focused on the Republican primary and what’s at stake in the 2024 election, the Biden campaign will have no problem raising record amounts of money online,” said Lauren Miller, who served as digital director to Elizabeth Warren’s Senate campaigns.Mr. Trump’s small-dollar percentage cannot be discerned until his joint fund-raising committees, into which most of his online solicitations direct money, report finances. They are not required to do so until July 31.Finance reports for the other Republican candidates reveal a party that, even more than Mr. Biden, is heavily reliant on large donors.Among the other Republican candidates, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida reported $2.9 million from small donors, but that figure accounts for a mere 14 percent of what his campaign raised. The small-dollar percentages among other candidates ranged from 34 percent for former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey to 2 percent for Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota, who is largely self-financing his campaign.Unlike the Obama and Trump campaigns, the Biden campaign didn’t begin with a digital fund-raising team in place. Instead, it has relied on the Democratic National Committee for its online solicitations. The campaign advertised last week that it was seeking a “director of email and SMS” to lead a division that typically would have more than a dozen people. The campaign recently hired a grass-roots fund-raising director, an official said Saturday.Mr. Biden’s campaign has plowed at least $3.3 million into advertising on Facebook and Google, according to data compiled by Bully Pulpit Interactive, a marketing and communications agency. That figure is far more than any Republican candidate has spent on the platforms and suggests that the campaign is investing in its search for small donors.Two of Mr. Biden’s top advisers, Anita Dunn and Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, who are overseeing his re-election campaign from the White House, this week formally blessed a super PAC, Future Forward, as the chief outlet for large sums of cash from supportive billionaires and multimillionaires. More

Federal disclosures on Saturday provided a first glimpse of the money race between the presidential candidates for 2024, showing who has amassed the most campaign cash so far. Cash on Hand on June 30 (in millions) Donald J. Trump $22.5 Tim Scott 21.1 Joseph R. Biden Jr. 20.1 Ron DeSantis 12.2 Vivek Ramaswamy 9.0 + […] More