The Joe Biden-turned-Kamala Harris campaign raised $310 million in July — a monster sum of cash sparked by the vice president’s entry into the presidential race.
Harris’ haul more than doubled the $137 million brought in by former President Donald Trump, who survived an assassination attempt and headlined the Republican National Convention last month. Harris’ campaign and other affiliated committees have $377 million in cash on hand, a $50 million advantage over Trump’s $327 war chest, according to figures released by both campaigns this week.
They’ve also raised over $1 billion during the campaign with four more months to go, the fastest to break the 10-figure mark in history, the campaign said on Friday.
The eye-popping totals have transformed the financial fortunes for Democrats, who had seen their financial advantage collapse under Biden in recent months.
In May, Trump’s enormous cash hauls after his hush money felony convictions in New York erased the cash lead Biden had built. Biden’s disastrous June debate, followed by a slow drip of calls from Democratic elected officials for the president to step aside, froze fundraising. Major Democratic donors canceled fundraising events and withheld money from the Biden campaign to express their disappointment. Small-dollar donations, too, started to dry up, forcing the campaign to make what it called “massive revisions downward” for the month of July.
But Biden’s departure from the ticket on July 21 and Harris’ elevation turned the money spigot back on, as major Democratic donors committed $150 million to a pro-Democratic presidential super PAC, and small-dollar donors rushed to give to Harris’s presidential campaign.
A slew of Zoom fundraisers, drawing hundreds of thousands of supporters and celebrity appearances, also took off in recent days. The Harris campaign said those coalition calls, including Black Women for Harris, Latinas for Harris, and White Dudes for Harris, raised more than $20 million.
Two-thirds of the July total came from first-time donors, and a majority of the total was raised from donations of $200 or less, the campaign said. It also said it had seen growth among Gen Z and millennial donors, a constituency Biden struggled to excite.
“This is a history-making haul for a candidate who will make history this November,” Harris campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez said in a statement. “The tremendous outpouring of support we’ve seen in just a short time makes clear the Harris coalition is mobilized, growing, and ready to put in the work to defeat Trump this November.”
Politico
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