Obama raises $7.6M for Biden’s campaign

WASHINGTON — Former President Barack Obama helped raise a record-breaking $7.6 million from more than 175,000 individual donors ahead of his first fundraiser for presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden.

“I’m here to say that help is on the way if we do the work,” Obama said during the virtual fundraiser. “Because there’s nobody that I trust more to be able to heal this country and get it back on track than my dear friend Joe Biden.”

The small-dollar fundraiser Tuesday offered a fresh test of Obama’s ability to transfer his popularity to Biden, his former vice president who is now seeking the White House on his own. It was a kickoff of what Obama’s team says will likely be a busy schedule heading into the fall, as he looks to help elect not just Biden but Democrats running for House and Senate.

Obama sometimes struggled to lift other Democratic candidates while he was in the White House, notably losing control of the House in 2010 and the Senate in 2014. But in the era of President Donald Trump, Democrats believe Obama’s appeal, especially among Black and younger voters, can help boost energy for Biden.

“There’s two groups of voters that Biden needs to move,” said Dan Pfeiffer, former White House communications director. “You have the 4 million Obama 2012 voters that sat out in ‘16, Obama obviously has cache with them. And you have to persuade some number of voters who voted for Barack Obama in 2012 and either Trump or a third party candidate in 2016, and Obama obviously is very, very high-performing with those as well.”

Obama endorsed Biden with a video message in April, but kept an otherwise low profile throughout the primary and largely avoided wading into national politics. In recent weeks, however, he’s reemerged publicly to speak out on policing and the civil unrest that followed the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.