| | | | |  | | By Garrett Ross | | Presented by |  | | | |  | THE CATCH-UP | | | ROLLING ON — President JOE BIDEN spoke with NBC’s AL ROKER this morning at the White House for a pre-White House Easter Egg roll interview. “1878, this started with RUTHERFORD B. HAYES,” Roker said. “A classmate of mine,” Biden quipped, flashing a grin. Watch the 4:43 clip SPOTTED on the White House lawn this morning: HUNTER BIDEN working the rope line. Pic
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Small-dollar donors are drying up for Donald Trump. | Jamie Kelter Davis for POLITICO | THE DONOR DRAIN — Both Republicans and Democrats face new signs that tapping into their respective donor bases for the general election will be more challenging this year than in previous cycles — all with the context that the two candidates running at the top of the ticket have been in the game for a while now. ON THE GOP SIDE: As Republicans tried to play catch-up to Democrats’ small-dollar money-making machine, they largely opened up a similar playbook as their counterparts — but the result was an all-out blitz instead of a measured push. To be sure: Democrats are seeing something of a slip in their small-dollar returns, too. But the issue is blowing up for Republicans. “In 2020, Trump and his fundraising committees raised a record $626.6 million from small-dollar donors, 35 percent more than Biden took in from that group. But last year, Trump raised just $51 million from small donors, way down from the $119 million he registered in 2019 and only 18 percent more than Biden’s total,” WaPo’s Josh Dawsey, Michael Scherer and Clara Ence Morse report. Trump’s campaign, specifically, sent text after text and email after email imploring its base of voters to give and give and give. “The former president’s friends told him that they were being asked for too much, too often, and Trump himself ordered aides at one point to slow the solicitations.” While there has been some bounceback for Trump’s operation, “fundraising firms have warned some GOP clients to lower their expectations. When former vice president MIKE PENCE launched his presidential campaign, officials at Targeted Victory, a small-dollar digital firm, warned him that ‘returns were way down because of oversaturation,’ according to MARC SHORT, his former chief of staff. Pence’s campaign struggled to raise small-dollar donations, and he dropped out long before voting began.” Said Short: “You had a new vehicle to raise money, but everyone kind of abused it. Its effectiveness wore out.” JOHN HALL, of Apex Strategies, put it this way: “The biggest problem in GOP fundraising is that we don’t treat donors well. Sending eight emails and texts a day that promise an artificial match, threaten to take away your GOP membership, or call you a traitor if you don’t donate doesn’t build a long-term relationship with donors.” It shouldn’t be a surprise that the Trump 2024 small-dollar infrastructure is organized by top campaign hand SUSIE WILES — and Trump’s team is still pushing out multiple pitches per day. “On days when Trump is under attack or has said something particularly controversial, he usually raises more money, his people said. He is sometimes briefed on the fundraising numbers, advisers said. These days, messages about his looming criminal trials and his promises to deport millions of immigrants perform better than anything else.” Right on cue: This morning, Trump’s campaign sent out the following email blast to its supporters …
|  | ON THE DEM SIDE: A circle of Democratic donors are circulating a private memo about young voters and people of color, focusing specifically on “whether to narrow the focus of voter registration efforts to avoid signing up likely Republicans,” WaPo’s Michael Scherer and Sabrina Rodriguez report. The memo was penned by AARON STRAUSS, a data scientist from OpenLabs, and sent to about a dozen donors in January. Among his warnings, he said “efforts to gain Democratic votes among younger and non-Black people of color were often expensive — costing more than $1,200 per net vote in 2020, by one estimate” and “called on donors to nonpartisan nonprofits to also donate to political groups that focus voter registration spending on ‘specific, heavily pro-Biden populations’ like Black Americans, while using more targeted techniques among other groups to filter out likely Trump supporters.” Good Monday afternoon. Thanks for reading Playbook PM. What’s the worst April Fools joke you’ve seen today? Drop me a line: gross@politico.com.
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Discover other stories. | | | | | 7 THINGS YOU NEED TO KNOW | | |  Speaker Mike Johnson's idea to slot a bipartisan bill pushing Russian assets toward Ukraine into an aid package could be a thorny issue to work through. | Francis Chung/POLITICO | 1. UKRAINE AID UPDATE: As Speaker MIKE JOHNSON floats adding into a Ukraine aid package a bipartisan bill aimed at seizing frozen Russian assets and giving them to Ukraine, our colleague Zachary Warmbrodt dove into the details of the issue in today’s edition of Morning Money: “While the policy has been taking shape for several months, a series of tense issues and key details still need to be resolved. A big underlying concern among some lawmakers looking to help Ukraine is that it could be seen as a substitute for enacting more aid, which leaders on the legislation say it’s not. On the global stage, the general idea has also run into some resistance in Europe, where most of the frozen assets at issue — around $200 billion — are held.” Meanwhile: Sen. LAPHONZA BUTLER (D-Calif.) weighed in on the Ukraine aid debate this morning, saying that she prefers her chamber’s legislation but is open to negotiating with the House: “Whatever form it takes to get the aid to Ukraine, that's the form that we've got to go with,” she said, per our colleague Burgess Everett. She also warned that the addition of LNG exports into the negotiations could cause “another delay.” 2. YOWZA: “Truth Social owner Trump Media lost $58 million in 2023,” by CNN’s Matt Egan: “The figures underscore why some experts warn Trump Media’s multibillion-dollar valuation defies logic and is reminiscent of the meme stock craze. In a filing on Monday, Trump Media said it lost $58.2 million in 2023, compared with a profit of $50.5 million in 2022. The Truth Social owner generated just $4.1 million in revenue, although that was up from $1.5 million in 2022.” 3. A BIG LIABILITY FOR BIDEN: Immigration is certain to be a centerpiece issue of the general election season, from the top to the bottom of the ballot. In the presidential race, Trump is continuing to trumpet his populist anti-immigrant rhetoric in rallies, speeches and posts online, while Biden is trying to juggle the issue from a policy angle in Washington. But “Trump’s message appears to be resonating with key elements of the Democratic coalition that Biden will need to win over this November,” AP’s Will Weissert and Jill Colvin report. Eye-popping numbers: “Roughly two-thirds of Americans now disapprove of how Biden is handling border security, including about 4 in 10 Democrats, 55% of Black adults and 73% of Hispanic adults, according to an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll conducted in March.”
| | | | YOUR GUIDE TO EMPIRE STATE POLITICS: From the newsroom that doesn’t sleep, POLITICO's New York Playbook is the ultimate guide for power players navigating the intricate landscape of Empire State politics. Stay ahead of the curve with the latest and most important stories from Albany, New York City and around the state, with in-depth, original reporting to stay ahead of policy trends and political developments. Subscribe now to keep up with the daily hustle and bustle of NY politics. | | | | | 4. HALLELUJAH, HERE HE COMES AGAIN: In Trump’s comeback campaign, he is often ending with something of a preacher’s touch, invoking prayer and the name of God to “transform the Republican Party into a kind of Church of Trump,” NYT’s Michael Bender writes. “Trump’s ability to turn his supporters’ passion into piety is crucial to understanding how he remains the undisputed Republican leader despite guiding his party to repeated political failures and while facing dozens of felony charges in four criminal cases. His success at portraying those prosecutions as persecutions — and warning, without merit, that his followers could be targeted next — has fueled enthusiasm for his candidacy and placed him, once again, in a position to capture the White House.” 5. DISINFORMATION DIGEST: “China’s Advancing Efforts to Influence the U.S. Election Raise Alarms,” by NYT’s Tiffany Hsu and Steven Lee Myers: “Covert Chinese accounts are masquerading online as American supporters of former President Donald J. Trump, promoting conspiracy theories, stoking domestic divisions and attacking President Biden ahead of the election in November, according to researchers and government officials. “The accounts signal a potential tactical shift in how Beijing aims to influence American politics, with more of a willingness to target specific candidates and parties, including Mr. Biden. In an echo of Russia’s influence campaign before the 2016 election, China appears to be trying to harness partisan divisions to undermine the Biden administration’s policies, despite recent efforts by the two countries to lower the temperature in their relations.”
| | | | A message from Meta:   | | | 6. SCOTUS WATCH: The Supreme Court this morning “rejected the appeal of a Minnesota woman who said she was wrongly denied unemployment benefits after being fired for refusing to be vaccinated for COVID-19 because of her religious beliefs,” USA Today’s Maureen Groppe reports. “The Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development determined she wasn’t eligible for benefits because her reasons for refusing the vaccine were based less on religion and more on a lack of trust that the vaccine was effective.” 7. FOR YOUR RADAR: “‘Target No. 1 for ISIS-K’: Terror group that hit Moscow nightclub has sights set on U.S.,” by USA Today’s Tom Vanden Brook: “The ISIS-K terrorist organization that killed more than 140 Russians March 22 in Moscow would like to replicate the attack in the United States, but they lack the capability, according to current and former senior U.S. officials. ‘The U.S. remains Target No. 1 for ISIS-K,’ said MARK QUANTOCK, a retired two-star Army general who oversaw intelligence operations for U.S. Central Command. ‘They clearly would like to strike the homeland, but their challenge is penetrating our security, which has proven to be quite resilient in recent years.’”
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