And Sunday night, Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., is set to mingle with Hollywood luminaries at the home of the president of MGM Motion Picture Group, Jonathan Glickman.
The race for cash in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary is reaching a frenetic peak this weekend with a dozen fundraisers on both coasts, as presidential hopefuls rush to vacuum up $2,800 checks — the maximum amount individuals can give for the primary by law — before the first quarterly fundraising deadline of the campaign at midnight Sunday.
But the candidates don’t want to discuss any of this.
They are instead trying to pull off a delicate balancing act. Publicly, the 2020 hopefuls are all about attracting low-dollar donors, trying to prove their grassroots appeal and populist bona fides by touting large numbers of small donations — an ascendant force in Democratic politics. But privately, most Democrats also badly need the big checks and are still going behind closed doors to woo the wealthy, whose money is critical to pay for campaign staff, travel and advertising.
As a result, a traditional part of presidential races early on — candidates trumpeting big-money and well-connected contributors as a show of political strength — has gone virtually underground, the invisible primary turning truly invisible. The jockeying for major donors remains as intense as ever, but the usual campaign announcements of powerhouse finance committees and boldfaced bundler lists have all but disappeared. Even some online RSVP pages for fundraisers don’t identify the wealthy backers anymore.
Amy Dacey, former CEO of the Democratic National Committee, said the donor dynamics this cycle are “fundamentally different” from before.
“Candidates talk more about how many different donors they have and how many states they’re in,” she said. “It’s more about the donor amounts than the dollar amounts.” But, Dacey added of big donors, “They still need them.”
Two prominent candidates, Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who caucuses with the Democrats, and Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., have disavowed the traditional money circuit entirely — a safe bet for Sanders, whose online donor network amply funded his 2016 run, but a far riskier gambit for Warren, who has a far smaller base of low-dollar contributors.
Former Rep. Beto O’Rourke, D-Texas, began calling some donors to seek support before he entered the race this month, but he is expected to lean heavily on a small-donor network that netted more than 100,000 contributions and $6.1 million in his first 24 hours. He has held no fundraisers so far and has none planned yet, according to his campaign.
Unlike in 2016, when the Democratic donor class rallied to Hillary Clinton, or 2008, when givers lined up with Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards, many of the party’s wealthiest figures remain firmly on the sidelines, serving as perhaps the biggest check on the role of big money in 2020 to date.
That has given an advantage to O’Rourke and Sanders, who are banking on small donations. Those two, plus Harris, who has a strong small-donor network and has been aggressively courting larger contributors, are widely expected to raise the most in the first quarter.
Several 2020 hopefuls have spent recent weeks canvassing the country, from Dallas to Miami, Chicago to Los Angeles, to raise the money needed in a crowded primary that is expected to easily cost hundreds of millions dollars.
At fundraising events, attendees say, most 2020 candidates typically are delivering more intimate versions of their regular campaign speeches, pitching their vision for the country along with a heavy dosage on their political viability and pathway to the presidency, amid caterers circulating with drinks and snacks.
This past Tuesday, Harris was in the tony Washington neighborhood of Kalorama at an event where hosts were asked to raise at least $10,000 (although the price points were not listed on the front of at least one version of the emailed invitation). The Saturday before that, Booker was feted at the home of New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy, a Democrat, as singer Jon Bon Jovi circulated in the crowd before a three-course dinner that pulled in $300,000, according to a person familiar with the event. And before that, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., was in Chicago asking for money at the home of a former Goldman Sachs banker who later served as ambassador to Canada, Bruce A. Heyman.
In between, donors are hearing from the candidates by phone. A lot.
“When I see a 202 number these days, I don’t usually answer it,” said Amber Mostyn, a Houston-based attorney and prominent Democratic fundraiser, joking about the Washington area code and the number of candidates who have reached out for help.
According to several donors as well as invitations obtained by The New York Times, four senators — Booker, Gillibrand, Harris and Klobuchar — have been particularly aggressive on the national donor circuit. Former Gov. John Hickenlooper of Colorado, Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington and Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana, have been making calls and organizing events, as well.
“It takes a lot of time away from what we should be doing,” said former Rep. John Delaney, D-Md., a businessman running for president who is mostly avoiding the money chase by self-funding his campaign. “I guess you’d call it a necessary evil.”
Schedules are often constructed, at least in part, around raising money. So while a recent trip by Harris to Texas drew headlines for her decision to rally in the home state of O’Rourke, the visit was also about raising money, with a fundraiser at the Dallas home of Jill Louis, a partner in the law firm K&L; Gates. (Louis is also a trustee of Howard University, Harris’ alma mater.)
Some big donors who remain unaligned are waiting for former Vice President Joe Biden. Some are holding out for the field to thin. Others are writing checks to a number of contenders without committing exclusively for any one of them.
Mitchell Berger, a longtime south Florida fundraiser and self-described political “dinosaur,” who fondly recalls his work on behalf of a young Al Gore in 1987, rattled off the names of five candidates who had called him. But Berger said that, while he had given to some, he had not yet hosted events or bundled contributions for anyone because he wants to see how the race will unfold.
In April, Steven Rattner and Blair Effron, two prominent donors in New York, are planning a dinner for unaligned donors to discuss how and when to engage in a primary contest that is more unpredictable than any in a generation.
“It’s completely different than 2016,” Henry Munoz, the Democratic National Committee finance chair and a longtime Democratic donor, said of the lack of urgency among fundraisers this year. He added: “Most of my donors are enjoying getting to know the candidates and being courted a little bit.”
Some big names have taken sides, according to people familiar with their activities. Laurie Tisch, a wealthy philanthropist, is supporting Booker and recently held an event for him in New York. Naomi Aberly, former chairwoman of the Planned Parenthood Federation of American board, is raising money for Gillibrand and organized a Texas fundraiser for her already. Wayne Jordan and Quinn Delaney, an influential political couple in Oakland, California, are backing Harris.
Warren has essentially abandoned the pursuit of such donors, even though some have raised big sums for her in the past.
“This is our chance to run a grassroots movement, not just to go around the country scooping up as much money as we can," Warren said.
But for those Democrats who are seeking cash in big chunks, Hollywood has been, as ever, a deep well.
On one night in mid-March, Harris was hosted at the home of J.J. Abrams, the director of recent “Star Trek” and “Star Wars” movies, with a who’s who list of co-hosts. Across town, Klobuchar was schmoozing with donors at the home of Jay Sures, co-president of United Talent Agency, with co-hosts including talent agent Peter Benedek and television producer Marcy Carsey, a longtime Democratic donor.
Lawyers have long been another mainstay of the Democratic donor circuit. Gillibrand got her start in politics raising money while working as a Manhattan attorney; she has three fundraisers just this weekend at the homes of law firm partners, two of whom she once worked with.
One of Gillibrand’s other events, on Sunday, has stirred some criticism; it is at the home of Sally Susman, a senior executive with the pharmaceutical company Pfizer. Though Susman is a longtime friend of Gillibrand’s, the event has served as a cautionary tale of the potential downsides of fundraising with industry executives.
Still, many veterans of Democratic fundraising believe that the eventual nominee will have to marry a robust network of small-dollar online givers with a high-dollar fundraising operation to both claim the nomination and defeat President Donald Trump.
Notably, Warren left open the possibility of attending fundraisers again, should she become the nominee. “I do not believe in unilateral disarmament,” she said of running against Republicans.
Julianna Smoot, who ran Obama’s 2008 finance operation, recalled that the former president raised considerable grassroots money but also spent hours on the phone building a team of bundlers.
“He did a lot of max-out, traditional fundraising,” she said. “You have to have an integrated approach.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.