Julián Castro has joined New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker in issuing supporters an ultimatum: Donate to my presidential bid or I’m out.
“I don’t say this lightly: If I don’t make the next debate stage, it will be the end of my campaign,” Castro wrote in a fundraising email Thursday.
Castro, an Obama administration-era housing secretary and 2020 White House hopeful, said donations would be funneled into “emergency ads” produced to drum up extra contributions and boost his polling numbers before the deadline to make the November round of Democratic National Committee-sanctioned debates.
The Democratic National Committee this week announced that candidates now have two pathways for making November’s debate state. First, they can receive 3% or more support in four polls released after Sept. 13 surveying voters nationwide or those in the early-voting states. Alternatively, they can secure their spot by notching up 5% of the vote in two single-state polls looking at respondents in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, or Nevada. The contenders also need at least 165,000 unique donors, though to qualify for the October series they only required 130,000.
“It could cost me millions to run the ads it’ll take to spread my message and hit those polls,” added Castro, a former mayor of San Antonio, Texas, in the email Thursday. “I know this new debate threshold is designed to cut candidates like me from the running. It’s designed for wealthy candidates with unlimited funds to blanket the airwaves with their message. But I wasn’t born into privilege like other candidates. I don’t have billions in personal wealth to fill my budget gaps.”
Castro’s plea follows a similar strategy deployed by Booker, the former mayor of Newark, New Jersey. Booker’s campaign manager, Addisu Demissie, last week wrote a memo warning that his boss would bow out of contention if the team didn’t attract an extra $1.7 million in funding by the end of the third financial quarter on Sept. 30. During the second quarter, Booker raised $4.5 million compared to Castro’s $2.8 million, but those figures pale in comparison to those of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, and former Vice President Joe Biden, who each hauled in more than $20 million during the same time period. Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren was a touch behind at $19.2 million.
Booker, in an email sent out Wednesday morning, said he’d “missed our $155,000 goal yesterday by $13,084.05.”
“This isn’t an end-of-quarter stunt or an attempt to spin the press. When we realized we were going to come up short of the resources necessary to grow, I knew we had a choice,” he wrote. “Hitting $1.7 million will determine if our campaign has a future in this race or not.”
The next debate will take place at Otterbein University in Westerville, Ohio, on Oct. 15 and Oct. 16. So far a dozen candidates have made the cut, including Castro and Booker.
