Usually, the ‘calls to donors’ aren’t high level people, but people who are connected and friends of other candidates and campaigns, always in the mode of thinking its them against the world interpret that to mean they are being frozen out by a vast conspiracy.
One of the stories about the Hackett campaign is that isn’t well known is they didn’t actually have a voters list until two weeks before the race when some folks came in at the last second and set up the ground operation. They did a good job, but it was late and ultimately, Hackett was a great candidate, but his campaign wasn’t as strong as it seemed.
Those sorts of concerns are why Schumer and others were worried about him and Rahm was trying to get a good candidate he could back and back heavy in a hard district to win with a better plan than last time. That’s not insulting, that’s a compliment as Markos points out.