Biden beefs up his finance team with 3 senior hires

President Joe Biden is beefing up his fundraising team, bringing on three top aides to help rake in the historic funds some Democrats think he and outside groups will need for his reelection bid in 2024.

The hiring moves, which were first shared with POLITICO, are a crucial step as Biden puts together the leadership group heading his finance operation and continues to build out his lean campaign overall.

Biden is tapping Colleen Coffey and Michael Pratt to serve as his campaign’s finance co-directors. He has also chosen Jessica Porter to be his grassroots fundraising director.

All three come to Biden from the Democratic National Committee, which has worked hand in glove with the president since he launched his reelection effort in April. Pratt was the DNC’s finance director, while Coffey was the DNC’s deputy finance director. Porter was the DNC’s online fundraising director.

“Colleen, Jessica, and Michael have already been invaluable to our historic fundraising efforts to date, and will be critical to our efforts to build an unparalleled and historic fundraising operation to ensure we have the warchest we need to win in November 2024,” said Julie Chavez Rodriguez, Biden’s campaign manager. “These leaders have incomparable expertise that will ensure we leave no stone unturned to raise money using innovative tactics that reach supporters where they are.”

Coffey and Pratt also previously worked as senior advisers for Biden’s 2020 campaign.

Though Biden struggled with fundraising in his first two presidential bids, he brought in record-breaking sums in 2020 when he ran against then-President Donald Trump.

This year, he announced that his campaign, the DNC and their joint-fundraising committeescollectively raised $72 million in the second quarter of the year. That’s less than then-President Barack Obama and the DNC brought in during the same quarter in 2011, though Biden entered the race a few weeks later.

Some Democrats have been concerned about Biden’s small-dollar fundraising. Biden and a joint-fundraising committee received more than $10 million from donors giving under $200 from his launch through June 30, which is less than half of what Obama took in from those donors in the first six months of 2011. Unlike Obama, however, Biden has run a decidedly frugal campaign in these early stages of the election, choosing instead to lean heavily on the DNC.

DNC officials have boasted of their fundraising accomplishments in recent years under the team that the Biden campaign has now hired. They said the 2022 election cycle was the best midterm grassroots fundraising cycle in the group’s history.

Democrats have also credited Porter specifically with a number of small-dollar and digital success stories: helping Biden kick off his reelection campaign with a bigger list of active email subscribers than they had at the end of 2020, overseeing the online fundraising team that raked in $2.5 million for the DNC in the two days after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision was leaked, and helping bring in $4 million for down-ballot candidates during the 2022 midterms.

Along with the hires unveiled this week, Biden’s finance team got more manpower last month when the president tapped Rufus Gifford and Chris Korge to serve as finance chairs for his campaign and Biden Victory Fund.