Slow pace of Biden's reelection campaign feeds Democrats' 2024 anxiety

The conversations keep happening - quiet whispers on the sidelines of events, texts, emails, furtive phone calls - as top Democrats and donors reach out to those seen as possible replacement presidential candidates.

Get ready, they urge, in conversations that aides to several of the people involved have described to CNN: Despite what he has said, despite the campaign that has been announced, President Joe Biden won't actually be running for reelection.

They feel like time is already running out and that the lack of the more robust campaign activity they want to see is a sign that his heart isn't really in it.

It's a persistent sense that the inner circle of advisers to the president and several of the very few aides who have been hired for his reelection campaign dismiss as absurd. Of course, he is running, they say. Of course, they're taking preparations very seriously. And, with the always present Biden chip on their shoulder, of course they're being written off again by the purported wise elders of the party and pundits who still refuse to take him seriously.

"They are so underestimated, and they keep getting it right," said Jim Messina, former president Barack Obama's 2012 reelection campaign manager, who has been one of the people privately advising Biden's team to ramp up gradually.

Anxiety, complaints and apocalyptic thinking that have often defined Democrats in the Biden years are about to get their latest Rorschach test, with the disclosure of fundraising for the first few months of his campaign - which must be filed by Saturday.

Concern over how it will be measured against the $86 million Barack Obama raised in the first few months after announcing his own reelection campaign in 2011, along with the slow pace of building out a campaign structure, is already feeding the latest round of frustration and worry described to CNN by almost two dozen current Biden aides, top Democratic operatives and donors, and alumni of other recent campaigns.