Kamala Harris Has Raised Almost $1 Billion — A Few Pro-Trump Billionaires Are Trying to Even It Up
This election cycle has been record-breaking with both Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump bringing in beaucoup bucks for their respective campaigns. Harris, however, has blown Trump’s contributions out of the water with a $600 million fundraising lead.
She raised nearly $100 million in the first half of October alone, bringing her committee’s fundraising total between Jan. 1, 2023 and Oct. 16, 2024 to $997.2 million relative to Trump’s total $388 million raised, according to recent data released by the Federal Election Commission for both Trump and Harris.
Harris has more billionaires publicly backing her than Trump (a count of 83 billionaires to Trump’s 52 billionaire backers), as Forbes reported, but fewer have elected to dish out their cash in support of her campaign than have for Trump — or at least not as generously as Trump’s uber-wealthy backers.
The billionaire donors, each contributing approximately $1 million to Harris’s campaign, include former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, famed director Steven Spielberg and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
In contrast, Trump’s billionaire backers are dishing out their cash in mind-boggling sums.
Over the past three months, three billionaires have funneled more than $250 million into Trump’s campaign.
Elon Musk, whose X platform (formerly Twitter) has now become a spotlight for Musk’s pro-Trump rhetoric, has now donated at least $118.6 million to date to Trump’s campaign, primarily through Musk’s specially founded America PAC.
Trump’s other big-ticket billionaire backers include physician and entrepreneur Miriam Adelson, whose donation total trails $18 million behind that of Musk and businessman Richard Uihlein, contributing a cool $49 million.
Outside the ultra-wealthy, it is Harris who seems to have the contribution edge among suburban voters, helping her reach that staggering fundraising lead.
Registered suburban voters donating online have been twice as likely to give to Harris than Trump, according to The Washington Post.
Gender, the Post noted, appears to be another large factor in financial giving to Harris versus Trump, with women often more likely to support Harris. In Pittsburgh, for example, 60 percent of female donors who are also registered voters gave to Harris over Trump whereas only 40 percent of men did the same.
While Trump’s donors trend toward slightly older males than Harris’s overall, Trump did well among men under the age of forty-five in rural, majority-white communities in states like Arizona.
In Georgia, less than 4 percent of Trump’s campaign contributors are Black whereas Harris has the support of 83 percent of Black voters and donors, according to a poll conducted by the Post and George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government that surveyed voters in seven swing states.
In contrast to the populist message that first helped propel him into office, Trump has seen a 40 percent decrease in small donors compared to his previous presidential campaign, which has forced him to rely on wealthy backers; Harris has seen more than 40 percent of her fundraising coming from small donors.
Given her massive fundraising haul, Harris has been outspending Trump on ads, social media and other campaign-bolstering techniques to a tune of $5 million a day, according to Bloomberg.
Typically, the candidate who earns the most and therefore spends the most wins, at least when it comes to House and Senate elections, according to data gathered by Open Secrets.
Will that apply to this presidential election? Is Harris’s success among small donors an indication of how she’ll perform among that population at the polls? We’ll only know once the ballots are counted, but it will nonetheless be a mighty indication of how much money talks in this 2024 presidential race.
