Harris Campaign’s Lack of Budgeting, Dumb Spending Decisions Led to Massive Debt
Maybe stop spending a fortune on celebrities? Believe it or not, they love capitalism and making money!
It shouldn’t shock anyone that VP Kamala Harris’s campaign is $20 million in debt despite raising $1 billion.
You mean a politician spent way more than they brought in? No way! Never! They totes budget like us normies.
Well, the campaign was a mess. It spent too much money on frivolous decisions that could have been avoided.
No wonder the Harris campaign flooded my email inbox with fundraising requests. This line hit hard in Jasmine Wright’s article at NOTUS:
Because of its inability to get a mass amount of people to donate multiple times, the campaign continued to miss and revise its fundraising goals, two operatives told NOTUS.
Jasmine Wright is one of the best sourced reporters inside Kamala Harris world and she’s out with her first report on what went wrong.
A lot of it adds up.
When I noticed the campaign spending a fortune on Instagram and Facebook ads for fundraising I assumed that a ton of… pic.twitter.com/2vbNsG7VmY
— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) November 10, 2024
Celebrities
For being so leftist, celebrities sure love capitalism. Is anyone surprised that celebrities demanded heavy price tags for appearances?
The Democrats never learn. We normies do not care about celebrities. We know they’re detached from reality. Even if they came from humble beginnings, most have forgotten what it’s like to budget and make sacrifices to meet ends.
The campaign spent $20 million on election eve concerts in swing states with out-of-touch celebrities: Jon Bon Jovi in Detroit, Christina Aguilera in Las Vegas, Katy Perry in Pittsburgh, and Lady Gaga in Philadelphia. However, because of costs, they had to cut Alanis Morissette.
The campaign even paid Oprah Winfrey $1 million for that town hall.
While the musicians are out of touch, people still enjoy their music and performances. If I had chosen my music based on my political beliefs, I doubt I would have any bands in my music collection.
So that means they’re tuning in for the show, not for Harris. I would go to any political rally if it featured Smashing Pumpkins or Tool, even one for Sen. Bernie Sanders!
Again, most people likely tuned in to watch the concerts, not Harris. It’s not a good idea to be overshadowed when you’re running for office, especially president.
I mean, Harris lost all of the swing states.
But the costs also included sets, venues, and vendors.
Podcasts
Speaking of sets…
Joe Rogan refused to go to Harris for his podcast. Many of us, including me, thought it was weird that she made such a demand because she traveled to other places for a podcast.
Nope. Call Her Daddy podcast host Alex Cooper flew to D.C. to film the podcast. The Harris campaign spent $1,000,000 to build a set for the interview to imitate Cooper’s podcast set in Los Angeles.
Consultants
Harris also spent $56.6 million on payroll and taxes. President-elect Donald Trump spent $9 million. He had hundreds fewer staff on his team.
I doubt the Democrats will learn from this mistake, even though people pointed out that consultants interfered with Harris’s need to define herself:
Harris’s payments to the consultant class will likely come under the microscope in the months ahead, as Democrats look to diagnose who is responsible for why the party lost this election so handily. Speaking on MSNBC after Harris’s Wednesday concession speech, former Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill said Harris “was listening too much to consultants,” which McCaskill argued detracted from her ability to “exude who she was” to voters.
“There was a segment of the electorate that was very consistently saying, ‘I’m not familiar with Kamala Harris,’ and, because of that, ‘I’m not comfortable enough to decide to vote for her,’ whereas Trump is incredibly well-defined,” said Jake Dilemani, a Democratic political strategist based in New York City. “It was easier for him to spend less and still win.”
“It’s the advantage of being such a well-defined person,” Dilemani told the Washington Examiner.
Blame Game
Those who spoke to Wright at NOTUS pointed the finger at Jen O’Malley Dillon, the campaign chair, and Rob Flherty, her deputy.
Harris inherited both from President Joe Biden’s campaign:
When Biden dropped out and endorsed the vice president, multiple people told NOTUS that he asked Harris to “take care of his people.” O’Malley Dillon requested a meeting with Harris and asked to remain on as campaign chair. Fearing critical stories about staffing similar to those that plagued Harris’ first campaign and first years as vice president, Harris relented.
“Kamala did not want to shake things up. She thought that what she could do is install certain people into leadership roles to make sure that she got the campaign that she wanted,” said the operative close to the campaign.
Others say that because of the structure of the complicated campaign, there was no way to turn O’Malley Dillon out. Her critics cite her leadership and the implosion of Beto O’Rourke’s 2020 Democratic primary campaign — which raised $6.1 million on its first day but ended months later due to major financial strain — as a precursor to this campaign.
O’Malley Dillon’s critics say she was insular and wanted to own all the decision-making, creating a bottleneck. In her role, she had centralized a major part of the Democratic Party’s power. She was effectively the head of the White House political arm; was in control of decision making at the DNC, despite Jaime Harrison serving as its official leader, according to two sources familiar; and chaired the campaign’s political operation.
The campaign did not have a leadership structure.
Some of the black aides felt “mistreated and demoralized, multiple people told NOTUS. Some had even wanted to make formal complaints and refrained for fear of retaliation.”
Bringing in Obama people didn’t help:
Harris hired an onslaught of high-profile operatives from former President Barack Obama’s successful 2008 and 2012 campaigns, hoping they could harness the late summer excitement and turn it into a winning outcome. But many saw the additions of Plouffe and others as just back up for O’Malley Dillon, as they had all come from Obamaworld.
“There was no one who had a different viewpoint. And anybody who had a different viewpoint was always sidelined,” said the operative close to the campaign. In the days since the blowout election, Democrats have criticized Plouffe’s focus on white people in the suburbs and moderates, calling the strategies like small-intimate town halls with former Rep. Liz Cheney, a failure, since Harris did not make significant gains with Republicans or people in the suburbs (though she did increase her numbers with college-educated white women).
“David Plouffe wanted to run a 2008 campaign for a 2024 election,” the operative said. “He wanted to win the middle. He wanted to win white moderates. He wanted to have people vote for Kamala despite what their tendencies would be. [He] wanted to treat Kamala Harris as Barack Obama, and she’s not Barack Obama.”
The volunteers didn’t have talking points or yard signs until October. They lacked reporting structures.
The campaign also did not find it necessary to fight the Trump ad mentioning Harris’s support for sex changes for incarcerated people. Well, Harris’s people “did not see voters moving over the anti-trans attacks.”
Let me tell you this. My X “Protect Female Everything” list has many women and men who went Republican due to the trans insanity. But all of us scream over the fact that no one listens to us.
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Comments
The Democrat way exemplarized
Do they still qualify as “celebrities”?
They cut the Canadian because that might bring up questions about where Komrade Kamala really “spent her teen years” growing up.
LOL. ANyone who believes that …
The Komrade Kamala campaign has so much fraud in it … the investigation into it could sustain 23,876,342 investigators’ jobs for 12,872 years. The Komrade Kamala campaign was like having a mini-Ukraine, here. The money was everywhere and … now, it’s just all gone, with tales of $275 toilet paper rolls.
I’m afraid the left ruined celebrity status when Johnny Carson retired and David Letterman got angry.
They don’t hold sway with normal people.
The celebrities the right once held as heroes (e.g., Elliot, Schwartzenegger, Ventura) turned out to be comsymps, while the authentically conservative celebrities (e.g., Schneider, Lovitz, Woods, Gibson) are C-list and/or have been “cancelled” by the Hollywood establishment. I’m just giving them the same respect they give us.
Lack of budgeting was not the only lack.
That’s for sure. Imagine this crowd running foreign policy, defense, or the DOJ. . . .
. . . .
Hey! It’s the Obama administration!
I knew something was familiar.
As if the past 4 years and those under 0bama weren’t evidence enough. So easy to blow through someone else’s money.
It would have been even worse if they had put Johnny Depp and Nicholas Cage in charge of spending.
A white male? Fie! Lindsay Lohan FTW!
Oprah is a multi-billionaire, and, yet, she wouldn’t appear for free, to promote her chosen candidate. That’s how strongly she believes in capitalism, LOL. Yet, she won’t vote for the GOP. And, these reprobates possess the nerve to slander conservatives and corporations as allegedly “greedy.”
Finally, it must be observed that if the gluttonous Oprah moderated her food intake, starvation in Africa would be immediately resolved.
That really got me, too. And, if she didn’t support Komrade Kamala enough to appear free then a million dollars should not have been enough to convince her to appear, at all. It’s weird and demented any way you slice it.
As Geddy Lee said to Bob McKenzie, “10 bucks is 10 bucks”.
I still suspect that the “donation in kind” regulations had something to do with celebrities’ reluctance to appear for free. But I’m not an accountant.
Was just going to say the same. Some accounting chicanery may be the reason behind the payment of the celebrities when they seem to have been the sort to do contribute to the campaign for free. Someone, the celeb or the campaign (and possibly both) benefitted from the arrangement somehow. (Possibly the celebrities are usually paid more for their appearances/endorsements, so having been underpaid pay by the campaign a write-off/loss is created for them?)
And Winfrey’s probably still buying up properties from burned out homeowners in Maui. About as cold hearted and cruel as one can be and an utter, complete fraud.
In many ways the Harris/Walz campaign and preceding Biden administration and infirmities may have been important; they exposed once and for all the abject blindness of the Obama unicorn view of the world. The terrible, unmeasurable cost is the pain and suffering imposed upon so many everywhere in the world. These are truly horrible people.
The elite left are complete hypocrites of their purported ideals. None of them wanted to pay even a nominal amount for a twitter check because they felt they were owed something by twitter for their very presence.
These are smug, petty, greedy, and thin-skinned people. They act like they have been so tough to come so far, but they are all extremely fragile about the fear of someone taking advantage of them. They will never truly embrace the virtues that they espouse. That’s why they want the government to do it all while paying them extra to be elite above the miserable masses in a socialist dystopia.
This is the game since the beginning of statism. Go back and look at the “benevolence” of the Soviet elite. They would play the shell game that our current DC critters do and the celebs want to pull. Modest pay but tons of lavish, taxpayer-sponsored benefits and grants that are all tax-free. When it all fell apart, the Russian elite used the wealth they had saved by having everything covered by the state to buy everything up and became the oligarchs of Russia. Today, they have no better situation than before but better than right after the collapse. That’s why they all support Putin because they can still remember when it was worse and there was near anarchy.
The progressive elite types would like to skip straight to that step but know they have to pay lipservice to socialism. They don’t like Bernie because he’s actually a true believer in the socialism part. He would stop them from robbing the country blind, but they may turn to him if he gets enough traction and wait for him to be out of power.
I should say that they have enough of a critical mass to support Putin. He is not universally supported but he has enough to make everyone else fear him and not openly oppose him.
Random comments.
Isn’t Opera guilty of price gouging?
Plouffe “wanted to treat Kamala Harris as Barack Obama, and she’s not Barack Obama.” Where’s my shocked face?
The guy who actually did original work to earn his hammer, then slacked out and treated every other problem as a nail.
Price gouging? Nah, it’s a fine example of the marketplace at work. Winfrey found a sucker in Harris and Harris found millions of suckers among Democrats in the population who contributed to her campaign.
Perhaps we should take some solace in the fact that they were not all as big fools as Morning Joe and his squeeze, and further, that we had a glimpse at how well things can be run by the first Trump presidency.
Democrats noticed that as well. They panicked and the massive fraud of the 2020 election was the result. The consequence of that was the disastrous, for the world, Biden administration, followed by the Harris/Walz campaign debacle, which finally exposed, again to the entire world, the frivolity and horrible fraud and dishonesty of these people.
Honest historians will have much to examine in years – centuries – to come, and it’s not over.
I am amazed these “entertainers” got paid to do their thing.
I am curious how much $$$, if any, these “entertainers” gave her campaign.
I think the payment to her was to her production company to pay staff, travel etc. I would think, though, Oprah could pick up that tab if she wanted. Trump bought all those people at the McDonald’s he worked at lunch.
I’d be surprised if she hadn’t dropped 7+ digits into Skamala’s coffers before getting some of it back in appearance fees.
We can compare this to how Biden/Harris and the demoncrats destroyed the USA’s economy. Their way of paying for pork is to print and print more money. We now have a president with business sense and something all demoncrats lack, COMMON SENSE! The Rinos are the only ones who hinder making AGA and hopefully we who really love the USA will send them packing when their time comes up for re-election.
One billion dollars of Joy, gone.
It was an “investment “ in the local communities.
Not gone. Just changed hands.
Oprah, Jon Bon Jovi, Christina Aguilera, Katy Perry and Lady Gaga laughed and danced all the way to the bank.
Komrade Kamala’s campaign was nothing but grift, from the top to the bottom. Tons of money disappeared with no discernible explanation ($1 million for a little tv set – LOL). It was like having a mini-Ukraine right in our own elections.
She couldn’t handle a simple election campaign, but she wants to take an iron fist to the entire US economy??
1. First, she was flushed with cash
2. Then she flushed her cash
3. Now the cash along with her political ambitions are down the tube
“Dumb spending” may not be so dumb. She paid Oprah $1m to host her town hall.
Don’t be too shocked when Oprah pays her $1m for some little thing a few months down the road. Voila, that money was transferred from her campaign to the bank account of one Kamala Harris!
This x 100 is how she will soon be independently wealthy. Thanks Dem suckers!
Recall that the biggest and most brazen Dhimmi-crat hypocrites of all with respect to matters of wealth, narcissist-incompetent-dunce, Obama, and his equally vile wife, the former having sanctimoniously lectured Americans, “At a certain point, I think you’ve made enough money,” have amassed at least three palatial mansions in their residential real estate portfolio (two of them waterfront-located), and, an obscene, undeserved and filthy pile of lucre north of $500 million, and, perhaps around or over $1 billion.
Not bad, for two manifestly lazy, shiftless and entitled divas, neither of whom has ever done an honest day’s work in the private sector that they perennially vilify.
Indeed. Obama, his disciples, acolytes, and followers are directly responsible for much of the tragedy we see in the world today, not just the state of America’s economy.
And we should be surprised, why?
It’s the same thing she and Biden have been doing since day#1. A leopard can’t change her spots.
leopardess??
How dare the pair of you assume someone’s gender!
/sarc, if it’s not obvious
“Some of the black aides felt “mistreated and demoralized, multiple people told NOTUS. Some had even wanted to make formal complaints and refrained for fear of retaliation.””
Oh my. Are there any complaints about Trump treating minority staffers poorly? No? Just democrats? And they were afraid of what the Democrats would do to them if they reported the racial abuse? Oh my.
McCaskill argued detracted from her ability to “exude who she was” to voters.
The problem is that there is no “there” there. She is a completely empty radical leftist with no original thoughts.
Concur. When “who she was” is an empty pantsuit, sharing that fact does not improve the situation; she needed the consultants to define who she was because she didn’t have enough imagination to construct a persona for herself.
Over budget, dumb spending decisions, big payoffs to cronies. Why the surprise? That exactly describes the Democrat style of governance.
Spectator: Kamala Harris ran the Fyre Festival of campaigns.
.. now that is cruel
One way to view this debacle is to see how Harris would have run our national budget. In three months she blew $1,000,000,000.00 and is $20,000,000.00 in debt! My God! Think of what she could have done in four years!!!!!!!!
“For being so leftist, celebrities sure love capitalism. Is anyone surprised that celebrities demanded heavy price tags for appearances?”
We were also supposed to believe that Harris was the candidate who would make sure the super-rich “paid their fair share” of taxes. Who thinks all these celebrities supported Harris because of her promise to tax them more? But Trump! He was the candidate of the billionaires!
I heard somewhere (don’t know how reliable the source was) that 70% of America’s billionaires supported Harris. I would not be surprised if this was true.
Exactly. Elon Musk quipped several weeks ago that Mark Cuban had demonstrated “that even billionaires can be morons.”
Check that price of the Call Her Daddy set. I think it was $100,000 not $1,000,000. I could be wrong. But the price tag of replicating the set should track more closely to the cost of the podcaster’s original set, and I don’t think she could afford anything like one million dollars for her set.
That set wouldn’t cost anything more than $5,000 to put together, if that. It’s a joke.
This is all graft and corruption. The money is just being laundered through the campaign and the leftist scum are all feeding on it like a pack of piranhas.
Blah blah blah.
Money laundering and wealth redistribution from gullible sheep to favored contractors.
who cares?
SERIOUSLY? You’re calling $20 million a massive debt? Ha ha ha. If you’re a politician, $20M is a mere bagatelle. Let them eat cake! They knew she was a scorpion when they allowed her to climb on their backs, so drown they must.
I am glad the Democrats pride lead them to reject Trump’s offer to ask the RNC to pay off her campaign debts.