Joe Biden and top allies have sought to reassure Democratic donors that he can defeat Donald Trump, after a disastrous debate performance left wealthy backers divided over whether the US president should abandon his re-election bid.

Biden conceded that he “didn’t have a great night” as he met donors at a fundraiser in East Hampton, New York, on Saturday, where the cost of entry ranged from $3,300 to $250,000 per person, according to the invitation.

“I understand the concern about the debate. I get it,” Biden told supporters in the wealthy resort town.

But the president argued that “voters had a different reaction,” adding: “Since the debate, the polls show a little movement, moved us up actually.”

Few polls have been released since Thursday night’s debate, but betting markets moved dramatically against Biden during and after the showdown. A Morning Consult poll conducted on Friday found roughly half of Democratic voters said Biden should step aside in favour of another candidate.

Three donors familiar with the East Hampton fundraiser described the mood in the room as subdued, despite the president appearing stronger than he did on the debate stage on Thursday night.

Biden was expected to attend another fundraiser later on Saturday in Red Bank, New Jersey, hosted by the state’s Democratic governor, Phil Murphy.

Senior Democratic lawmakers and party grandees have also reached out to donors in recent days. Chuck Schumer, the most senior Democrat on Capitol Hill, has tried to reassure several backers about Biden’s candidacy since the debate, said two party fundraisers.

There have been mounting calls for the president to step aside and allow another Democrat to be the party’s nominee for the White House ahead of November’s election.

At 81 years old, Biden has faced questions for months about his age and fitness for office. But any concerns that Democratic insiders had privately about the incumbent president spilled out into the open on Thursday night, after nearly 50mn Americans watched Biden struggle through a live, televised debate against Trump. The president rambled, appeared to lose his train of thought and struggled to complete sentences.

Biden has insisted that he will stay in the race, and campaign officials say he will participate in a second presidential debate planned for September.

The campaign has touted what it says has been a record influx of grassroots, or small-dollar, donations, since Thursday. A campaign official said on Saturday morning that the campaign had raised more than $27mn between the debate and Friday evening.

“It wasn’t his greatest debate. But it is 90 minutes . . . in a campaign and in an administration, where he has achieved enormous things,” Anita Dunn, a longtime senior adviser to Biden, said on MSNBC on Saturday. “Maybe it wasn’t a great debate. But he has been a great president.”

Asked if Biden’s inner circle had discussed him dropping out after the debate, Dunn replied: “No, the conversation we had is, ‘OK, what do we do next?”

Jen O’Malley Dillon, chair of the Biden campaign, accused the “beltway class” of “counting Joe Biden out”.

“If we do see changes in polling in the coming weeks, it will not be the first time that overblown media narratives have driven temporary dips in the polls,” O’Malley Dillon said.

But the White House assurances have done little to quell public unease. Late Friday, the influential New York Times editorial board published a leader urging Biden to step aside.

On Saturday in East Hampton, reporters travelling with the president saw a group of onlookers holding signs that read: “Please drop out for US,” and “Step down for democracy,” and: “We love you but it’s time.”

The debate fallout has divided Democratic donors, whose support is critical to fund a campaign that is set to spend hundreds of millions of dollars in an effort to secure another four years in the White House. Biden’s long fundraising advantage over Trump has eroded in recent months. Trump outraised Biden in both April and May amid a swell of support following his conviction on 34 criminal charges in New York last month.

While some donors have redoubled their efforts to rally people around Biden, others are more skittish. One Democratic fundraiser noted some Wall Street megadonors intend to keep bankrolling the Biden campaign while trying to convince him to make way for another candidate. Another camp intends to withhold their donations altogether.

Still, several high-profile Democratic donors have come to Biden’s full-throated defence.

LinkedIn founder and billionaire Democratic donor Reid Hoffman sought to calm fellow deep-pocketed Biden supporters in a letter on Friday in which he acknowledged that the president had a “very bad debate performance”. But he added that it would be a ‘bad idea” to launch a public campaign to get him to step aside.

“This election is very close, and I don’t know who will win,” Hoffman wrote. “But as a political philanthropist, with 129 days until the election, I am doubling down on my bet that America will choose Biden’s decency, care, and proven success over Trump’s violence, lies, and chaos.”

Trump narrowly leads Biden in national opinion polls, according to the latest FiveThirtyEight average, as well as in most of the key swing states that will decide the outcome of November’s election.

One Democratic fundraiser said donors would be looking at polling in the coming days to plot their next move.

Several are already contemplating who they would throw their weight behind if Biden were to step aside, with Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer among the most popular names being floated. Three donors and bundlers also said Democratic House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries was gaining interest from Wall Street elites.

“The results of those polls will help donors decide what to do next . . . if the result is negative there will be consequences,” the fundraiser said.

But the Biden campaign showed little outward signs of concern about the polls at the weekend.

Geoff Garin, president of Hart Research and a pollster for the Biden campaign, said in a post on X Saturday evening that two surveys he had conducted in battleground states following the debate showed it had “no effect on the vote choice”.

“The election was extremely close and competitive before the debate, and it is still extremely close and competitive today,” Garin said.

Additional reporting by Alex Rogers in Washington

Seven people, including four children, were shot by a neighbor at a Nebraska home Friday evening, according to authorities, who said the crime could potentially be racially motivated.

At about 4:33 p.m., multiple 911 calls were made to report an active shooter situation on the 1200 block of Crestline Drive in Crete, a town in southeastern Nebraska, Nebraska State Patrol Col. John Bolduc said at a news briefing Saturday. Local officers and deputies responded to the scene, where they could still hear gunshots, including a single gunshot that came from a home across the street.

About 15 people were at the home at the time of the shooting, most of whom were outside in the yard, according to a news release. At least one of the victims was inside the home. It’s not clear at this time who was a resident and who was visiting.

“It was quickly determined that all gunfire had come from a single residence at 1810 Parkland Street,” Bolduc said, adding that a SWAT team responded to the home to apprehend what was believed to be “a barricaded subject.”

The SWAT team entered the home at about 6:40 p.m., where it found the 74-year-old suspect, Billy Booth, dead with a self-inflicted gunshot wound. A shotgun was found near Booth’s body, Bolduc said.

“Preliminary investigation shows that all rounds fired by Booth came from inside of his house,” Bolduc said. “Investigators are still actively working this investigation to understand everything that occurred, but at this point, we don’t believe there was any verbal contact between the suspect and any of the victims in the moments that led up to the shooting.”

Three of the victims found on the scene were adults, ranging in age from 22 to 43. Four were children, ranging in age from 3 to 10, Bolduc said. All of the victims are believed to be Hispanic, according to Crete Police Chief Gary Young Jr.

Six victims were taken to the hospital initially and a seventh realized he was injured later that evening, according to the state patrol. Four have been released from the hospital and three are still receiving care — two of whom are in a children’s hospital. All are expected to survive.

There was a history between the suspect and the victims’ families, according to Bolduc. The Crete Police responded to “several complaints” since 2021, most of which came from Booth regarding “driving behavior” in the neighborhood, according to Young, who also spoke at the news briefing.

“Not necessarily associated with the victims’ house, but cars driving too fast in the neighborhood, improper parking, nuisance properties, quality-of-life type issues,” Young said. “There was a single report from the victims that the suspect had flipped them off, told them to ‘Go home’ or ‘back to where they came from,’ to ‘Speak English.’”

A responding officer who interviewed the family and the suspect at the time was willing to escalate the case, but the family declined, saying they would contact police, Young said.

“That resolved the situation, so we had no further contact,” Young said.

When asked if there could be a racial element to the shooting, Young said, “There could be, we don’t know.”

“Certainly the context of ‘Go home’ and ‘Speak English’ lends itself to that,” he said.

A motive is still under investigation, Young said.

State patrol said they were on the scene of “an active situation” on the east side of Crete Friday evening and warned the public to “stay clear of the area.”

“The active situation has been resolved. There is no threat to the public,” state patrol posted on X an hour later.

Authorities are asking anyone with information on the case to come forward. The shooting remains under investigation.

The big-box US retailer Target is struggling to return to growth a year after backlash against LGBT+ themed merchandise triggered sharp declines in sales, while arch-rival Walmart is luring more of the affluent customers that form the backbone of its business. 

Target won legions of fans starting in the 1990s with stylish in-house brands and advertising that lent its stores an aura of affordable chic. Annual revenue exploded to more than $100bn after the onset of Covid-19 as cash-rich consumers found they could buy most anything they wanted in a single place, minimising the risk of contagion. 

But sales have faltered as inflation leads shoppers to put fewer items in its iconic red plastic shopping carts. Some observers wonder if Target — affectionately called “Tarzhay” by regulars — is losing cachet. 

“They have a pandemic hangover,” said Chris Walton, a former Target executive who runs Omni Talk, a retail sector-focused media company. Target declined to make executives available for interviews.

In the past week Target announced a series of changes as it tries, in the words of chief executive Brian Cornell, to “get back to growth”. The Minneapolis-based company started a search for a new chief marketing officer less than a year after the current one, Lisa Roath, took the job (she is moving to a new role next year). 

Target also announced a deal to allow some third-party merchants from Shopify, the Canadian ecommerce platform, to sell products through its online marketplace. And it rolled out plans to load a generative AI chatbot on the devices carried by clerks at its nearly 2,000 US stores to improve efficiency. 

To boost sales volumes, Target is cutting prices on thousands of products from sports drinks to laundry soap this summer.

The changes come after a dismal year for Target even as several other mass merchandisers flourish. Comparable sales have declined in each of the past four quarters. Executives predict a modest improvement over the course of the fiscal year, with sales ranging between unchanged and up 2 per cent. 

The sales decline began a year ago, when in addition to the effects of inflation and higher interest rates Target dealt with a backlash — including bomb threats to stores — against LGBT+ oriented merchandise prominently displayed to celebrate Pride month in 2023. Complaints centred on items for children and “tuck-friendly” women’s-style adult swimsuits with extra room for a wearer’s penis.

Comparable sales in the second quarter of 2023 shrank by 5.4 per cent, the most since the global financial crisis, in part due to what an executive called a “strong reaction to this year’s Pride assortment”.

The controversy illustrated how consumer brands endorsing social issues have become enmeshed in American culture wars. On Thursday, Tractor Supply, a farm and garden retailer, eliminated diversity and inclusion goals and said it would stop sponsoring Pride festivals after pressure from rightwing critics began to drive down its share price.

Target this year said it would sell Pride month merchandise online and in some, but not all, stores. One store visited by the Financial Times this week contained no signs of it, while another featured a Pride kiosk in the middle of the store with rainbow-adorned dresses, shirts and totes and packs of multicoloured “LED Pride string lights”.

The amount of negative feedback around the Pride collection, both internally and externally, has been significantly lower this year than in 2023, a company representative said.

Steven Shemesh, a retail analyst at RBC Capital Markets, said the financial impact of the Pride controversy was temporary, making the continued softness in sales a sign of deeper issues.

Target was particularly vulnerable to the inflation surge because of its heavy dependence of discretionary items such as linens, home decor and toys, which consumers spent less on as they stretched their dollars on staples. Groceries accounted for 23 per cent of its sales last year compared with 60 per cent for Walmart. “Whenever there’s a macro slowdown, they’re more exposed,” Shemesh said. 

This exposure has been reflected in Target’s share price: up 2 per cent in the past two years, while the S&P 500 index has rallied by 43 per cent and Walmart by 66 per cent.

Cornell’s plan to restore growth includes adding more than 300 stores to increase annual sales by about $15bn in 10 years, while remodelling hundreds of others. New private-label brands will be launched as they “help keep our edges sharp on the newness, discovery and affordability consumers crave in the market and find at Target”, he told an investor event earlier this year. The company aims to return to the 6 per cent operating profit margins it routinely surpassed before the pandemic.

Survey data from Numerator, a market research group, showed Target customers are more likely to be middle or high income, younger, female and urban or suburban. They include shoppers such as Stacy Irwin, a resident of an affluent suburban New Jersey town who this week dropped into a Target store to buy bedsheets. 

“If there was a Walmart nearby I’d end up there more for its prices, but the vibe here is a little bit . . . cooler,” the mother of two said. 

Walmart has been making inroads with richer consumers, however. The world’s largest retailer’s US sales have been rising, in contrast with Target’s, and it recently flagged households making more than $100,000 a year as a major source of demand. 

“My immediate reaction was, ‘That is bad: they are Target’s bullseye,’ so to speak,” said Toopan Bagchi, a former vice-president at Target who leads Starship Advisors, a retail consultancy. “It’s concerning from Target’s perspective that Walmart saw an increase in traffic from Target’s traditional stronghold of higher-income consumers, because Target’s business model relies on those consumers to buy a lot of discretionary, non-food items with higher margins.” 

Target’s heavy reliance on in-house private-label brands means that its announced price cuts could cause a bigger sales hit than markdowns where outside vendors share the pain. “Historically, price wars do not benefit retailers’ margins,” said Jodi Love, a portfolio manager at T Rowe Price who holds Walmart but not Target in her funds.

Walmart, Target and other store-based retailers have poured money into ecommerce as Amazon disrupted their brick-and-mortar businesses. Amazon has a 40.4 per cent share of US retail ecommerce, far surpassing Walmart’s 7.8 per cent and Target’s 1.7 per cent, according to Emarketer.

Oliver Chen, a TD Cowen analyst, said Walmart’s ecommerce business was on a quicker path to profitability than Target’s. BNP Paribas Exane, the only broker with a sell rating on Target, argued that online market share gains from rivals including Amazon, Walmart and China-based deep discounter Temu threatened Target’s $106bn in total sales, not just online sales. 

Target has tied most of its digital growth to its store footprint, enabling online customers to pick up orders at their local outlet or receive a speedy home delivery. “So if you think store shopping will wind down anytime in the next decade, we’ll politely disagree on that point,” Cornell told analysts earlier this year.