Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, makes a campaign appearance at a firehouse in Redford Township, Michigan, October 4, 2024. Photo / Valaurian Waller, The New York Times
Her frenzied spending has led to second-guessing among some Democrats and questions as she has pressed for more cash since the election.
Vice-President Kamala Harris spent a remarkable US$1.5 billion ($2.55b) in her hyper-compressed 15-week presidential campaign. But in the days since losing to President-elect Donald Trump, her operation has faced questions internally and externally over where exactly all that cash went.
Despite her significant financial advantage, Harris became the first Democratic presidential candidate to lose the national popular vote in two decades, ceding every battleground state to Trump.
Her cash-rich campaign spared no expense as it hunted for voters – paying for an avalanche of advertising, social-media influencers, a for-hire door-knocking operation, thousands of staff, pricey rallies, a splashy Oprah town hall, celebrity concerts and even drone shows.
It was a spree that averaged roughly US$100 million ($170m) per week.
The frenzied spending has led to second-guessing among some Democrats, including whether investing in celebrity-fuelled events with stars such as Lady Gaga and Beyonce was more ostentatious than effective.
Since her loss, the Harris operation has pressed supporters for more cash with desperate-sounding solicitations, stirring fears about postelection debts. “Is there anything we can say?” came one email asking for cash last Monday.
The biggest expense during the race was advertising. Between July 21 and October 16, financial records show that the Harris campaign spent US$494m (842m) on producing and buying media, a category that includes both television and digital ads. The total sum through the election is said to be closer to US$600m ($1b).
Yet starting in October, her campaign was actually narrowly outspent on broadcast television by Trump, according to data from ad-tracking service AdImpact.
The ads were just one piece of a campaign that had enough cash to spend on seemingly everything. There was US$2.5m ($4.2m) directed toward three digital agencies that work with online influencers, records show. The campaign spent around US$900,000 ($1.5m) to book advertising on the exterior of the Sphere venue in Las Vegas in the last week of the race, two officials said. There were drone shows in the sky before the debate in Philadelphia in September and at a Pittsburgh Steelers game in October.
In a note Friday to Harris’ top fundraisers, Chris Korge, the Democratic National Committee’s finance chair, said that losing all seven battleground states had “shocked us all”.
“I will absolutely push for an introspective study and analysis of the campaign, its structure, its messaging, all communication platforms and budgeting,” Korge wrote.
Given the magnitude of Harris’ loss, more of the focus so far has been on the Democratic brand and message rather than the mechanics of her operation. Harris inherited a campaign based in inconvenient Wilmington, Delaware, that was built for President Joe Biden, and she had limited time to refashion it to better suit her strengths.
Harris added some senior advisers but mostly kept the Biden team in place, including Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, the powerful campaign chair who oversaw the finances and virtually every major move.
The campaign’s spending decisions were documented in Federal Election Commission records and interviews with 15 Harris campaign officials and close allies, most of whom insisted on anonymity to discuss internal finances and dynamics candidly. Many of the financial figures in this article are from the latest campaign reports; some are from Harris officials with knowledge of the spending. All told, the Biden and Harris campaigns collectively raised about US$2.15b ($3.66b), two people said.
It is not clear exactly how much Trump spent, though it was far less. Trump and the Republican Party together raised US$1.2b ($2b), one person with knowledge of the figure said.
Even in defeat, there were some signs of the effectiveness of Harris’ spending: she performed stronger in the battleground states than nationally. Some Harris aides and allies have taken a strange sort of solace in the scope of her defeat as Trump captured 312 electoral votes – far more than the 270 needed to win.
“There is not a single expenditure in a different spot that would have changed the outcome of the race,” said Bakari Sellers, a close ally of Harris and a former lawmaker in South Carolina. In fact, Sellers said, the campaign faced an unusual problem: “We had so much money it was hard to get it out the door.”
Patrick Stauffer, the campaign’s chief financial officer, said in a statement that there had been no outstanding debts or overdue bills as of election day. He said that “there will be no debt” on the next Democratic National Committee and Harris for President campaign filings in December.
Donations made after the election to the “Harris Fight Fund” are being funnelled to the Democratic National Committee, officials said.
In recent days, the committee has shed hundreds of staff members, an expected downsizing after the defeat. The party had a payroll of roughly 680 in October and is shrinking by roughly 70%, according to two people familiar with the cutbacks. A DNC official said 95% of those being let go had a postelection end date in their offer letter.
Still, the reductions were symbolic of the boom and bust of elections – and the severity of the bust in defeat.
“We are prepared to lead the fight against Donald Trump into the future,” said Rosemary Boeglin, communications director for the Democratic National Committee.
Trump himself mocked the Harris team for its financial situation in a recent social media post: “Whatever we can do to help them during this difficult period,” he offered.
One particular Harris payment has drawn attention in the aftermath of the election: the US$1m ($1.7m) paid to Oprah Winfrey’s production firm, Harpo Productions. In an Instagram post, Winfrey said the company was paid to stage a livestreamed town hall in Detroit, providing the set, lights, cameras, microphones, crew, producers and even the chairs.
“I did not take any personal fee,” Winfrey wrote. “However the people who worked on that production needed to be paid. And were. End of story.”
The US$1m actually undercounts the full cost of the event, which ran closer to US$2.5m ($4.2m), according to two people briefed on the matter.
Another pricey choice was holding swing-state rallies featuring star performers on the eve of the election, including Lady Gaga in Philadelphia, Jon Bon Jovi in Detroit, Christina Aguilera in Nevada, James Taylor in North Carolina and Katy Perry in Pittsburgh.
The singers themselves were not compensated, officials said, but the support staff was. The overall bill for the election-eve rallies exceeded the planned budget and is said to have topped US$10m ($17m).
The cost overruns were partly because the Harris team built an entire rally venue at a park in Pittsburgh only to be told by the Secret Service that the site could not be properly secured. They had to rush to take it down and rebuild at a second venue.
“Because of Vice-President Harris’ unparalleled fundraising prowess,” Stauffer said, “we were able to run an aggressive all-of-the-above strategy to reach voters, keeping the seven battleground states incredibly close.”
Even as Harris ran notably stronger in battlegrounds such as Pennsylvania, Georgia and North Carolina than in surrounding areas, those results were double-edged, politically. They suggested that the ticket she led was so unpopular that it took an enormous campaign just to limit her losses.
Though Harris had been on the ticket from the start, her advisers discovered that the Biden operation had done virtually no research on her strengths and weaknesses. Her operation spent more than US$12m ($20m) on polling from July 21 to mid-October, records show.
Other major costs, according to records and campaign officials, included US$111m ($189m) in online ads seeking donations, at least US$100m ($170m) transferred to battleground-state parties, US$70m ($119m) on mail and nearly US$28m ($47m) to produce the merchandise that people were ordering. And for all the focus on her volunteer programe, the campaign spent a significant sum – about US$50m ($85m) – for paid door-to-door canvassers.
In an October 16 memo, the leading super political action committee supporting Harris raised alarms about being outspent on television. The group, Future Forward, said in the memo, which was first reported by The Washington Post, that it would be “difficult for anyone” but the Harris team to close the gap because of the higher ad rates that super PACs pay.
It was hardly Future Forward’s only frustration. Another memo, issued days later, pointed out “very high-performing ads that have yet to get a big spend”. One ad, Future Forward said, had ranked in the “100th percentile” – meaning it was the most effective – yet it had virtually never been aired.
Campaign officials, meanwhile, were frustrated that Future Forward sat on so much of its money until the final weeks, forcing the campaign to spend more on the airwaves earlier.
Another Harris challenge: After raising US$1b ($1.7b) in less than three months, a bevy of consultants, allies and others were often angling for a cut, including the chair of the Democratic Party in Philadelphia. In September, the Harris operation contributed almost US$25m ($43m) to other party committees, in part to quiet those demands.
Some media allies of Harris were also paid. Areva Martin, who hosts a talk show, was paid US$200,000 ($340,000) as a media consultant and she went on a battleground-state tour in October.
Roland Martin, who hosts his own streaming programming and runs a media company called Nu Vision Media, received US$350,000 ($597,000) in September for a “media buy” that he said was for advertising.
“It should have been a hell of a lot more,” Martin said in a brief interview. “More should have been spent on Black-owned media.” Martin interviewed Harris in October.
Harris’ campaign also made two US$250,000 ($426,000) donations to National Action Network, the organisation led by the Reverend Al Sharpton. Sharpton interviewed Harris on MSNBC in October.
As Harris faced questions about relative weakness among Black voters, her campaign gave US$2m ($3.4m) in late September to the National Urban League.
One of the unanswered questions is who exactly made money off the commissions on Harris’ advertising, which can be especially lucrative. Such payments are often hidden even in federal disclosures.
In 2020, for instance, Mike Donilon, who was one of Biden’s top strategists, reported on his personal financial disclosure form with the White House that his consultancy had earned US$4.35m ($7.4m) in 2020, far more than the roughly US$543,000 ($925,000) disclosed to the Federal Election Commission in payments to his firm.
Numerous firms could have netted big commissions from the Harris campaign. Four companies received at least US$90m ($153m) in payments as of mid-October, including one firm whose cumulative receipts from the Harris campaign approached US$300m ($511m).
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Shane Goldmacher
Photographs by: Erin Schaff, Haiyun Jiang and Loren Elliott
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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