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11-10-2024
WASHINGTON: US Vice President Kamala Harris has pulled in more than $1bn in fundraising since becoming her party’s presidential nominee in July, according to US media reports.
While the Harris campaign has yet to disclose the exact total, several sources familiar with the figures, cited by The New York Times and NBC News, confirmed she has surpassed the $1bn mark. It includes funds directed to her campaign as well as to related Democratic Party committees.
The dizzying fundraising surge gives Harris far more cash than her Republican opponent, former President Donald Trump, to spend in the final leg of a neck-and-neck race.
In August, Trump and the Republican Party brought in $130m, leaving them with $295m in cash available compared with Harris and the Democrats’ $404m.
Harris is also poised to greatly exceed Trump’s September fundraising total of $160m, having raised $72m from three end-of-month events, reports The New York Times.
However, Republicans are making up some ground via super political action committees (PACs), organizations that can pool unlimited funds for candidates without directly coordinating with their campaigns.
So far in the 2024 election cycle, the largest super PAC supporting Trump has outspent the largest super PAC backing Harris by tens of millions of dollars, according to OpenSecrets, a nonprofit focused on campaign finance and transparency.
Harris’s deep campaign war chest is likely to boost her advertising and operations in battleground states in the month before the November 5 elections, which polls show is currently a toss-up.
While Harris retains a slight national lead in the polls, most of the seven key swing states that could decide the election are too close to call.
A new poll by InsiderAdvantage for Pennsylvania, the swing state with the greatest potential to sway the election, shows Trump up by two points.
Harris had to race to build campaign infrastructure and woo donors after replacing 81-year-old President Joe Biden as her party’s nominee in July.
Vice President Kamala Harris has stepped up her media appearances, giving interviews to outlets big and small in an effort to appeal to voters in the final weeks of the United States presidential race.
The Democratic nominee continued with her media blitz on Tuesday, granting interviews to The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, the talk show The View and veteran broadcaster Howard Stern who was once a friend of former President Donald Trump.
Early in her campaign for the presidency, Harris faced criticism for failing to make a major media appearance.
She announced her presidential bid on July 21, and it was more than a month later, on August 29, that she gave her first TV interview since launching her campaign.
That gap created scrutiny over her media strategy. Veteran media critic Margaret Sullivan, for instance, wrote in The Guardian newspaper that Harris had an obligation to tell the US public “in an unscripted, open way” what she stands for.
“Harris should show that she understands that, in a democracy, the press at least in theory represents the public, and that the sometimes adversarial relationship between the press and government is foundational,” Sullivan said.
Surveys have also indicated a desire among the electorate to know more about the Democratic nominee. (Int’l News Desk)
