Fredreka Schouten and Edward-Isaac Dovere,
CNN
Wed, October 9, 2024
Vice President Kamala Harris’ political team has raised $1 billion since entering the presidential race in late July, two sources familiar with the figure told CNN – marking a massive fundraising milestone in her campaign against former President Donald Trump.
Other presidential candidates, alongside their political parties, have exceeded the $1 billion mark in past elections. But Harris has crossed that threshold at a breakneck pace, underscoring how much her ascension to the top of the Democratic ticket roughly two-and-a-half months ago has transformed the finances of this year’s White House contest.
“It’s clear that Harris has done something absolutely unprecedented,” said Sarah Bryner, research director at the nonpartisan group OpenSecrets, which tracks money in elections.
The Harris campaign declined to comment. Presidential campaigns will report full details of their September fundraising and spending to the Federal Election Commission later this month.
The surge in giving has helped Harris rocket past the sums collected by Trump’s campaign. His team has announced collecting roughly $430 million jointly with the Republican Party during the three months between the start of July and the end of September.
At this rate, the former president could struggle to even match what his political operation raised during the 2020 campaign, OpenSecrets’ researchers noted in a report this week.
Outside super PACs funded by wealthy Republicans are helping Trump to bridge the financial gap. A Trump-aligned super PAC, Make America Great Again, Inc., has led outside spending in the presidential race. But a super PAC affiliated with Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and a prominent Trump backer, has plowed more than $79 million into this year’s elections.
The $1 billion figure for Harris was first reported by NBC News.
Harris' political operation crosses $1 billion raised for the 2024 election
Wed, October 9, 2024
Vice President Kamala Harris’ political team has raised $1 billion since entering the presidential race in late July, two sources familiar with the figure told CNN – marking a massive fundraising milestone in her campaign against former President Donald Trump.
Other presidential candidates, alongside their political parties, have exceeded the $1 billion mark in past elections. But Harris has crossed that threshold at a breakneck pace, underscoring how much her ascension to the top of the Democratic ticket roughly two-and-a-half months ago has transformed the finances of this year’s White House contest.
“It’s clear that Harris has done something absolutely unprecedented,” said Sarah Bryner, research director at the nonpartisan group OpenSecrets, which tracks money in elections.
The Harris campaign declined to comment. Presidential campaigns will report full details of their September fundraising and spending to the Federal Election Commission later this month.
The surge in giving has helped Harris rocket past the sums collected by Trump’s campaign. His team has announced collecting roughly $430 million jointly with the Republican Party during the three months between the start of July and the end of September.
At this rate, the former president could struggle to even match what his political operation raised during the 2020 campaign, OpenSecrets’ researchers noted in a report this week.
Outside super PACs funded by wealthy Republicans are helping Trump to bridge the financial gap. A Trump-aligned super PAC, Make America Great Again, Inc., has led outside spending in the presidential race. But a super PAC affiliated with Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and a prominent Trump backer, has plowed more than $79 million into this year’s elections.
The $1 billion figure for Harris was first reported by NBC News.
Harris' political operation crosses $1 billion raised for the 2024 election
Natasha Korecki and Jonathan Allen and Carol E. Lee
Updated Wed, October 9, 2024
Democrats' presidential fundraising took off when Kamala Harris jumped into the race in place of Joe Biden in July.
Vice President Kamala Harris' presidential campaign operation crossed the $1 billion fundraising threshold in September, two months after she took over as the Democratic Party's standard-bearer, according to two people familiar with the numbers.
The figure includes money raised by the campaign committee itself and by a campaign-affiliated joint fundraising committee that also collects cash for the Democratic National Committee and state parties
The staggering pace suggests Harris has been able to sustain enthusiasm among donors, large and small, as the campaign enters the stretch run before the Nov. 5 election. But it comes amid a historic onslaught of outside spending from super PACs and other groups that has the Harris campaign concerned — particularly about direct mail, in which Republicans have opened a steep advantage in recent months, and on the ground, with groups like Elon Musk's super PAC and others working to turn out voters for former President Donald Trump.
Meanwhile, public polling shows a finely balanced contest, with little separating Harris and Trump in the key swing states that will ultimately decide the election — and a sliver of swing voters still waiting to decide based on something they see in the last four weeks.
Presidential campaigns tend to take in more money as an election nears, but a clip of roughly half a billion dollars a month is unheard of. Biden's campaign raised a little more than $1 billion for the entire 2020 election cycle, which included a competitive primary campaign, and affiliated outside groups chipped in another $580 million, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
Harris has opened up a huge cash advantage over Trump, who had raised just $309 million for his campaign through the end of August.
Republican super PACs are helping fill in the gap, spending more than $80 million on TV ads across the country in September, according to AdImpact, an ad-tracking service. The biggest GOP groups have reserved more than $100 million in ads for the final weeks.
And yet more money is pouring into online, mail and door-to-door campaigning.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
No comments:
Post a Comment