Joe Biden never had a chance to win the Democrats' presidential nomination, and I said so a week and a half after he announced his candidacy.  He's just too stupid and too corrupt (even for a Democrat), no matter how much name recognition he has and how much he appropriates the fondness many Democrats have for Barack Obama.  Those factors were enough to inflate his polls for a while, but not enough to carry him over the finish line next summer in the Milwaukee convention, much less into the Oval Office.

It took a couple months, but the big-bucks donors came to understand this, and they abandoned him, leaving his campaign stuck in spending too much money to raise money, and depleting his cash reserves, also known as the law of diminishing returns.

Sam Stein of the Daily Beast reports:

Joe Biden's presidential campaign is bleeding cash. And a big reason why appears to be an antiquated, higher-end approach to electoral politics that the former vice president has adopted. 

Biden's team spent more than $923,000 on private jets during the third quarter of 2019, according to recently filed Federal Election Commission data. The expenses, all made to the company EJCR, LLC Dba Advanced Aviation Team, represented a major chunk of change — accounting for roughly one out of every 16 dollars the campaign raised. (snip)

[A] review of Biden's expenditures suggest that a good deal of what he's spending money on currently involve efforts to simply raise more money. 

The former vice president spent more than $230,000 on "fundraising consultants" during Q3; nearly $500,000 on direct mail; and major chunks of change on high-end hotels in cities that serve as donor hubs but aren't centrally located in early-voting states. 

Keep in mind that the media and fellow Democrats are still refusing to acknowledge the ethical issues of a druggie son raking in millions of dollars from corrupt-looking foreign sources while his dad is point man for U.S. policy on their nations.  But the donor class doesn't need Anderson Cooper to tell it that this sort of arrangement will not pass muster in November next year.  They don't want to waste their money on a candidate who won't be able to deliver favors for them from the Oval Office.  The stink of death around his campaign is unmistakable now.

Photo credit: Gage Skidmore.