Then-Vice President Joe Biden speaks as then-President Obama watches during a signing ceremony in 2016. Obama joined Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, for a virtual fundraiser Tuesday.

Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images

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Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images

Then-Vice President Joe Biden speaks as then-President Obama watches during a signing ceremony in 2016. Obama joined Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, for a virtual fundraiser Tuesday.

Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images

Former President Barack Obama joined his former vice president, Joe Biden, on a virtual fundraiser on Tuesday evening, as top-level Democrats seek to consolidate voters around the party’s 2020 presumptive nominee.

“I am here to say the help is on the way if we do the work, because there’s nobody I trust more to be able to heal this country and get back on track than my dear friend Joe Biden,” Obama told supporters on the video conference.

The former president said he believes the situation Biden is inheriting — with the coronavirus pandemic, a recession and racial unrest — is tougher than the one that greeted him when he came into office in early 2009, but he said that he is inspired by a “great awakening” going on among young people.

“I appreciate you all being on this call, but man, this is serious business. Whatever you’ve done so far is not enough. And I hold myself and Michelle and my kids to the same standard,” Obama said.

More than 175,000 people donated to the Tuesday event, according to the Biden campaign, which billed it as a grassroots fundraiser, though press access was limited, and no video stream was made public.

The event raised $7.6 million, the campaign said.

The fundraiser is the latest in a series of virtual events with big-name Democrats that have brought in significant fundraising hauls for Biden, helping him and Democrats bring in more money than President Trump’s campaign and Republicans in May.

A recent virtual event headlined by Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who refused to hold high-dollar fundraisers during her own primary campaign, raised $6 million. California Sen. Kamala Harris recently helped Biden raise $3.5 million. And two other onetime presidential candidates — former South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar — each raised more than $1 million in their own events.

The fundraisers have helped Biden turn around a reputation as a lackluster fundraiser. Throughout 2019 and early 2020, he regularly brought in less money than Warren, Buttigieg and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, despite the fact that neither Sanders nor Warren participated in high-dollar fundraising events.

But in the past two months, Biden’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee have raised more than $140 million. Biden was dead even with Trump’s fundraising numbers in April, and outraised him in May. It’s highly unusual for a challenger to raise more money than an incumbent president.

Trump entered the 2020 race with a significant cash-on-hand advantage, and on Tuesday evening, his campaign said it had raised more than $10 million from Friday to Sunday around Trump’s in-person rally in Tulsa, Okla.

Former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, a Biden backer, recently told NPR he’s been raising money for political candidates for four decades, and never seen this much of a sudden uptick in fundraising enthusiasm. He said the shift has as much to do with how Trump has handled the coronavirus and recent protests over racial injustice as with Biden himself.

Biden’s campaign has put the money to use. Last week it announced a $15 million advertising campaign across six key swing states Trump won in 2016: Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, North Carolina and Florida.

With reporting by NPR’s Scott Detrow