2020 election: Obama tells Democrats they haven’t done enough in fundraiser with Biden

Former president helped raise more than $7m for Biden campaign from tens of thousands of donors in a single evening

Former president Barack Obama has warned Democrats not be to complacent in Joe Biden’s presidential campaign and to do more to ensure he wins the White House, even as Donald Trump struggled to erode his challenger's dominating lead in the polls.

Speaking during a Tuesday fundraiser that raised millions of dollars for Biden’s campaign, Mr Obama said: “We can’t be complacent or smug or sense that somehow it’s so obvious that this president hasn’t done a good job, because look, he won once.

“This is serious business. Whatever you’ve done so far is not enough. And I hold myself and Michelle and our kids to that same standard.”

Mr Obama was speaking to a virtual crowd of some 120,000 people; the event raised a total of $7.6m, according to the Biden campaign, with around 175,000 individual donors – even though no live stream was made public. It is one of the Biden campaign’s best single nights of fundraising so far.

However, the Democratic campaign against Mr Trump is inevitably taking place in the shadow of 2016, when Hillary Clinton outpolled Mr Trump to the end only to find herself defeated by ultra-slim margins in states that decided the electoral college outcome.

It was with an eye to this that Mr Obama crafted his message for the fundraiser, in which he repeatedly conveyed the importance of defeating the incumbent president in just over four months’ time.

“You’re all feeling a sense of urgency – the same kind of urgency that I’m feeling right now, that Michelle’s feeling, that so many of us feel as we look at the news, and we talk to our friends and neighbours and those who are hurting.

“And I am here to say that help is on the way if we do the work. Because there’s nobody that I trust more to be able to heal this country and get it back on track than my dear friend Joe Biden.”

Mr Obama endorsed Mr Biden in April, after the former vice president had scored a long series of primary victories and made it all but impossible for Bernie Sanders to gather the delegates needed to clinch the nomination.

The Trump campaign, meanwhile, is attacking Mr Biden on three main fronts: China, to which he is supposedly too friendly; his cognitive faculties, which are allegedly in decline; and his son, Hunter, whom the Trump team say has benefited from corrupt cronyism with the vice-president’s assistance.

However, Mr Biden has now led Mr Trump in every major national poll for some time – in some of them by as much as 15 points. And the spectacle of Mr Trump’ recent rally in Tulsa, where he failed to fill an arena expected to be overflowing, indicates that the president’s campaign is so far failing to live up to its own expectations.