Biden to visit Miami for campaign fundraiser
The trip, his sixth to the state as president, could invite chatter about the campaign’s intent to compete in the state.
President Joe Biden is scheduled to travel to Miami on Jan. 30 for a fundraiser hosted at the home of Chris Korge, the national finance chair of the Biden Victory Fund, according to an invitation shared with POLITICO.
Ticket prices start at $3,300 and go as high as $250,000 for a co-chair ticket.
While the trip is designed to pad campaign coffers, it will likely invite chatter about whether the president is looking to compete in Florida, which had been a traditional swing state up until its recent rightward drift.
The trip will be Biden’s sixth visit to Florida as president. He last visited the Sunshine State in September to survey damage caused by Hurricane Idalia. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis skipped out on meeting Biden during that trip.
Biden lost Florida to Trump in the 2020 election by more than three percentage points and his campaign has been clear-eyed about the difficulty of winning the state in 2024. They see a clearer path to victory through the Rust Belt states that Biden took back from Trump as well as the Sun Belt states of Georgia, Arizona and Nevada.
The Biden campaign entered the new year on the heels of a successful fourth quarter fundraising stretch. Biden, the Democratic National Committee and their joint-fundraising committees brought in more than $97 million in the final three months of 2023 — putting the president ahead of his recent Democratic predecessor. The campaign, which has been slow to staff up and relatively frugal, announced on Monday that it had $117 million cash on hand.
Former President Donald Trump has not yet announced how much he raised in the fourth quarter of 2023. But Biden’s fundraising numbers trail behind what Trump was able to bring in at the end of his third year in office, when he and the Republican National Committee collected more than $154 million.
In the email invitation to donors, Korge wrote that he hoped the Miami reception would be the largest fundraiser for a presidential candidate ever hosted in Florida and said the “excitement around this event has been amazing.”
